3.2 Data: Life expectancy

When we’re trying to see if two or more variables are related - in this case, life expectancy and unemployment (+ others) - we need to get our data on a granular basis.

Typically we’d be looking for census tract level - one of the smaller units that the Census Bureau reports on, which generally encompass between 2,500 and 8,000 people. There are over 65,000 tracts across the United States.

Until rather recently, we couldn’t get life expectancy data on a census tract level - but thanks to USALEEP this data is now readily available!

The USALEEP project produced estimates of life expectancy at birth—the average number of years a person can expect to live—for most of the census tracts in the United States for the period 2010-2015.

Let’s take a note of what the data covers: most of the census tracts in the United States for the period 2010-2015.

We’ll grab the life expectancy for the entire USA, a relatively small 2.6MB csv file.

3.2.1 The data dictionary

We’ll also grab the data dictionary from the same page, just so we can be aware of what weird column names mean (and any limitations of the data, if they mention them). It’s linked up above, and referred to as the Record Layout