Uninsured Americans By Family Income

In the news media, you hear a lot of talk about whether or not the Democrats will be able to carry out health care reform, and whether the Republicans will be able to stop them, but very little coverage describes any specific problem of the U.S. healthcare system in detail. Almost no one talks about how the relationship between socio-economic class and health insurance coverage. So I spent several hours compiling public data from the U.S. Census Bureau into a spreadsheet. In particular, I gathered 2006, 2007, and 2008 data from the Annual Social and Economic Supplements of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. From this data, I created the following visualization of how health insurance coverage is directly related to family income:

The Y-axis represents the percentage of people within a family income level that lack insurance. For example, in 2008, 46.30% of Americans with no family income had no health insurance. It looks like the more money you have, the more likely you will be insured, and the less money you have, the less likely you will be insured. Read more »

---

Females Are Granted More Degrees In Sociology Than Males

Using data from the National Science Foundation, I created some simple curvilinear graphs to examine the male to female ratios of sociology degrees. During the early 1990s, females started earning more doctorates in sociology than males. Why? Did males stop pursuing PhDs in sociology in favor of other academic disciplines? Or was there an influx of female graduate students from the undergraduate ranks?

Read more »

---