Final Proposal

The dataset that I decided to use was the 1883 pensioners set. The dataset includes numeric, text and geographic data. There is only one category that would have a minimum and a maximum and that is the amount that someone would receive in a monthly pension, with the minimum being $2 and the maximum being $25 (from the looks of it people receive pensions in increments of $4 or $8 based on reason). The other columns that have numbers in them are  the columns in which there are pensioners identification numbers shown (this column will probably not help for any research purposes) and the column that shows the date a person started getting a pension.This column opens up a couple questions that I could use to find relationships. All of the people in the dataset live within Albany County while another column shows which town each pensioner is from. Albany County does cover a variety of town types so the types of people do vary a good deal. Other columns describe the reason why a person receives their pension where reasons vary from axe injuries to being a single mother. There is also a column that shows people’s name so  that won’t really help for any research purposes.

Relationships:

The relationship between the reason for pension and amount the person receives:

This seems pretty obvious but I feel like in those days there would be weird reasons everyone would do things. Like being a single mother or a widow looks to be one of the lower paying pensions. The way we look at things now we would assume that a single mother with presumably with a few kids would receive a higher pension than someone with a minor injury.

The relationship between pension start date and the amount received:

The hypothesis that I have about this area is that people who received pensions for the same reason might have different amounts that they would receive. I feel like there could be a variety of reasons that someone might get a different amount possibly based on gender, race, age etc. I also feel that possibly people with an earlier start date could have a higher pension than a newer person or vice versa because the might have been giving people too much or too little.

The relationship of where people live and what injuries they have:

This kind of falls under the category of “could be something, could be nothing”, based on my knowledge of the area, I know that some of the towns listed are city and some are rural. I think that there might be a correlation between where people live and the injuries that they have. Like, the people in the rural areas would presumably have the axe injuries and city people would not. If I can find that correlation I could get into the real stats of the distribution of the pensions in Albany County. For example I could find where the money for particular injuries are distributed and so on.

One thought on “Final Proposal

  • April 11, 2016 at 9:20 PM
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    Good observations about possible relationships. One possible visualization might be a symbol map (we did a filled map in class and in the walkthrough post; a symbol map is right next to the filled map in Show Me), with the symbols sized to the average pension paid. So you’d end up with a map of towns in Albany county with pensioners, and circles larger or smaller (or colored) based on the average pension for that location, which might tell you something about your rural vs urban question.

    Likewise you may want to group your reasons (ie, single mother and widow in one category; axe injury and factory injury in another) to see if there’s a correlation between reason and average pension. You’ll want to give some thought to how you make your groups–is it also urban vs rural, is it about common types, is it about age, etc.

    I suspect (but I don’t actually know!) that there won’t be much difference between pension amounts based on the start date, but it is worth investigating.

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