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[Project]: US Food Environment #142

Open christina10211 opened 6 years ago

christina10211 commented 6 years ago

A completed version of this template can be found at https://github.com/jsoma/data-studio-projects/issues/1

Pitch

I've always interested in the topic of food desert, neighbood where people don't have proper access to affordable and good quality fresh food. At first, I was trying to only focus on NYC, and to see how severe the food environment is for different boroughs. However, the database that I finally managed to get is about the food environment of the whole US. I tried to narrow it down to the 5 boroughs, but unfortunately, the Manhattan population that has low access to grocery store is only 2 people. I don't know if there is a data error or methodology issue, so clearly I cannot use the low-access indicator to measure the food environment of Manhattan because everything thing is within walk distance for almost everyone according to the 'suspicious' 2 people record.

As a result, I shift my research from a micro to a macro perspective, i.e.the nationwide food environment severity and the correlation between local food environment and food choice and diet quality.

Summary

I first filtered out the top 5 state with the highest food insecurity rate and 5 states with the lowest food insecurity rate and then conduct analysis based on the following indicators (county-level) from 3 major perspectives: Fast food expenditure, physical distance from grocery stores, and poverty rate (socioeconomic factor)

I have several visualization ideas:

  1. If considering from a macro perspective, I'd like to make a choropleth mapping the food insecurity rate across the US.
  2. From a micro perspective, I'd like to go to each indicators and find correlations with food insecurity rate.

Details

Possible headline(s):

Data set(s): https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-environment-atlas/data-access-and-documentation-downloads/

Code repository: https://github.com/christina10211/Data-Studio/tree/master/code/01-food_environment

Possible problems/fears/questions:

  1. I am a little lost in how to deal with about 200 indicators of food environment, how to draw connections among different indicators and how to visualize them. (or should I just focus on indicator one at a time???)
  2. I am also debated about if I've chosen the most appropriate visualization to present my data. (See details below in food expenditure section)

Work so far

  1. Combine different indicator tables into a big one

  2. Filter out the top 5 most food insecure states and top 5 most food SECURE states, and make 2 bar charts:

high_insecure low_insecure

I want to combine them into a pyramic graphic like this:

pyramid

I also did a combined version of the above 2 graphs, and I'm not sure which one to use...

insecurity_combined

  1. Compared these two groups by other indicators in order to see what's the key driving factor behind the food environment severity

Indicator 1: Does Physical Distance from Households to Grocery Stores Prevent People from Getting Proper Access to Staple Food? ----Household access to grocery stores ( measured by physical distance between households and grocery stores) ----Low Access indicator:percentage of population in a county living more than 1 mile from a supermarket or large grocery store if in an urban area, or more than 10 miles from a supermarket or large grocery store if in a rural area.

distance_vs_insecurity

Major Finding for Indicator 1: The distance betweeen household and grocery store didn't seem like a key factor causing high/low food security in these 10 states. For the top 5 food insecire states, the percentage of population that lives with low access to grocery store are below 25% except Arizona. For the top 5 food secure states, three of them has exceptionally high population lives far away from grocery stores.

Indicator 2: Food Choice Do people spend more on fastfood or full-service restaurants in these 10 states? Which kind of food choice are more available and accessible in the neighhood? Fastfood or Full-service? Is there a tendency that fastfood chains are more likely to open stores in highly food insecure neighborhood?

I first did pie charts for the most food secure states, I will do the same for the other 5 food insecure states

pie_secure

Checklist

This checklist must be completed before you submit your draft.

ElinaMak commented 6 years ago

Great work for such a complicated topic with several parameters / indicators. Graphs so far, look great!

angelareplica commented 6 years ago

This topic is really interesting and complex! Since there are so many moving parts and indicators, I would probably focus on 1 or 2 super specific things (e.g. fast food expenditures, like you mentioned, or what percentage of each state lives in a food desert? just some random thoughts)

christina10211 commented 6 years ago

Challenge: Which visualization is better? Bar chart or pie chart?

my concern with bar chart is that i've used it many times during this project, using pie chart seems to diversify the visualization a little bit. On the other hand, I was worried that is 10 pie charts too many?

Below are two bar charts, which are alternative vis for food expenditure on fast food and full service restaurant.

bar_food_insecure

bar_food_secure

Another Challenge I've encountered is a technical one. When I put together my 5 pie charts for the food secure states in illustrator, I've had a real STRUGGLE in aligning things and making them look 'standardized', however, I still haven't cracked that down yet. Can anyone help me out on this issue? Since doing all the alignment manually is really a painful thing to do, or...Is it the only way to do things in illustrator?

benbitoun commented 6 years ago

I like the pie charts - but in order the read them and compare them I would need some numbers in it that I can compare.

pasiegrist commented 6 years ago

To your challenge: Which visualization is better? Bar chart or pie chart? As you want to show share of total expenditure, I think the pies are ok. But: Get them in order, fix the point where for example the blue share starts and sort it by what you want to show. (Detail: Minesoda has a typo)

Lose the graph with the distance, it is just confusing.

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