Youth Risk Behavior

by Team Hull

Summary

For our project, we decided to focus on an issue relating to young people in recent years. We wanted to focus on the data provided by Youth Risk behavior Surveillance System(YRBSS), for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), that monitors the 6 risky behaviors; violence and injury; substance abuse; tobacco use ; weight problems; lack of physical activity; and risky sexual behavior. The original data set we looked at included all these risky behaviors but was inadequate as there was 13 million data entries from between the years 1991-2017 and across multiple age ranges and American school grades which is a data set too large to work with in Rstudio therefore, we decided to focus on 2 risky behavior data sets(Weight Issues & Substance Abuse) in one school range(Middle School).

The data sets where created on August 29th 2016 and were last updated March 29th 2019. Therefore the data has a good range across 26 years period from 1991-2017 so we can visualize and evaluate trends in substance abuse and weight issues. The substance abuse data set is made up of 35 columns and 33.4 thousand entries. The weight issues data set is made up of 35 variables and 40 thousand entries.

We imported the 2 data sheets and scanned over the data to see what variables can be used to produce interesting graphs, what variables are useful to us, and how this data proves things that are said media about these topics. We came up with our goals as:

• Discover whether risky behavior such as “substance abuse” and “weight issues” may appear more or less frequently among different categorical variables such as sex, race, etc.

• Model how risky behavior trends throughout different grades.

• Map important or interesting trends that we found along the way.

From our data and visualizations we we were able to conclude about weight issues:

• Overall, USA has a similar incidence of “weight issues” across the board.

• At first glance, seems as if coasts (generally but not always more urban) exhibit more weight issues.

• Some spread of rural across the board, a number of islands s.a. Northern Mariana Islands and especially American Samoa trending towards fewer weight issues.

• This could have to do with culture; heavier weight more accepted/admired in Samoan culture.

• Females tend to believe they are overweight more frequently than men.

• Females have trended down a bit, but has gone up a little bit in recent years, although remaining below 30%.

• Males have maintained between 22% and 25%, not much variation over time.

From our data and visualizations we we were able to conclude about substance abuse:

• Females at lower risk overall than men to abuse substances

• Risk of substance abuse has been going down over time

  • Although there was a slight resurgence in the latest year collected

If we had more time or the coding ability we would have liked to:

• Comparing common trends between the two datasets (Is geography correlated?.

• Comparing all 6 risk factors in some way. or comparing the 2 risk factors over different school levels.

• Looking for more opportunities to find correlation, regression, other trends.

• Perhaps creating a literal map with a “heat map” with an additional package.

• Would give us slightly more precise visualization with respect to geography.

Presentation

Our presentation can be found https://f2209927ca3c49c386c7f1f6717e6018.app.rstudio.cloud/file_show?path=%2Fcloud%2Fproject%2Fpresentation%2Freveal.js_template%2Fpresentation.html]

Data

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2019, DASH YRBSS - Weight Control (MS), DASH - Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS): Middle School DASH Public Inquiries, viewed 22 October 2021, data file(CSV), https://chronicdata.cdc.gov/Youth-Risk-Behaviors/DASH-YRBSS-Weight-Control-MS-/xg5u-askg

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2019, DASH YRBSS - Alcohol and Other Drug Use (MS), DASH - Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS): Middle School DASH Public Inquiries, viewed 22 October 2021, data file(CSV), https://chronicdata.cdc.gov/Youth-Risk-Behaviors/DASH-YRBSS-Alcohol-and-Other-Drug-Use-MS-/bdg5-rnzz

References

Data Set (Substance Abuse): https://chronicdata.cdc.gov/Youth-Risk-Behaviors/DASH-YRBSS-Alcohol-and-Other-Drug-Use-MS-/bdg5-rnzz,

Data Set (Weight Issues): https://chronicdata.cdc.gov/Youth-Risk-Behaviors/DASH-YRBSS-Weight-Control-MS-/xg5u-askg,