Day 12, Mat115H

• We have a homework for Wednesday:

  Find the "five (or so) dimensions of mental well-being", and then five (or so) short yes/no (or easily answered) questions that people can answer through a survey that we might administer to folks in Newport.

  Type up and justify your work!

• Psychology and the hope metric -- Kara (and Kensey and Haley)
• Income inequality -- Marisa and Alli
• Done: Photography -- Betsy and Cassidy
• Done: History -- Emily and Sandra
• Done: Public art and Little Free Libraries -- Melody, Grace, and Robin

For your presentations I had asked you to focus on these issues:

1. What did they do (or what are they doing): describe successes and failures
2. What impact will/did their intervention have/had on 505?
3. What can we learn from their project?
4. What advice might they give us as we set off on our own project?

• How are people in Newport's Westside hurting or healthy?
• How can we measure the hurt or health?
• How can we compare Newport's Westside to other areas?

• Emily says: "We might be of some use if we were to analyze the data, and see if we could find some sort of correlation between the poverty, low education, and some other outside factor to see what we actually need to change..."
• Many of you focused on the "lower income" and economic issues. Is it just relative? If so, we should focus on a measure of "dissimilarity".

  Question: If you have as much as your neighbors, do you become content? Or do you always want 20% more?

• Grace: is crime just displaced (e.g. by Monmouth street's development)? Is there a fixed amount of crime, and it's just being moved around?
• Grace and Betsy: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. "Higher-level needs like family stability, culture, and spirituality are not easily quantifiable...."
• Cassidy mentions measuring the appearance of an area. That seems like something that we could quantify.
• Robin actually defines "hurt" and "healthy": that's a good idea.

  Hurt: "To be in distress or have a deficit that could cause harm or worry."

  Healthy: "To be free or mostly free of worry or distress caused by burdens."

  Robin also set out some criteria for surveys, that are worth discussing (as we think about setting up a survey).

• Here is a beginning on some things that we might carry out:
  1. One thing that we can do is collect data on the neighborhoods, and Newport in particular.
     1. Enlightening descriptive statistics
     2. Survey results

  2. We can attempt some analysis
     1. Lead mapping
     2. neighborhood adjacency "contagion" for various census factors
  3. We are in the process of talking about collecting (and eventually analyzing) some data on "social connectivity" -- e.g.
     1. Do you have someone you can tell your problems to?
     2. If you suddenly became ill, is there someone who could take care of you?
     3. If you suddenly lost your home, is there somewhere you could go for housing?
     4. If you suddenly lost your job, is there somewhere you could go for financial assistance?
     5. How many social organizations are you affiliated with, such as churches, unions, service clubs, social clubs, etc.?
  4. We can do an Eastside/Westside comparison, or even Westside/OTR comparison (Betsy).

• Descriptive Statistics
  1. Data issues
     • surveys
     • errors
     • bias
     • outliers
  2. Central Tendency
  3. Variation

• Inferential Statistics
  1. Distributions
  2. T-Tests
  3. Anova

• Graphical Fusions, Illusions, and Delusions
• Trees and Graphs
• Spatial Interpolation

Some Links:

• A GoogleMaps app provided by Doug Hume of Sociology.
• A cool tool to allow you to visualize the neighborhood on several census variables by census tract.
  Here's what may be a commercial version of the same thing? It's got a little more resolution. I'm checking with our library to see if we can have the professional access.
• Tract 505 ACS 2006-2010 census Profiles
• Map showing Census Tract 505
• Google Earth map of the tracts of Kentucky (505 is number 27302)
• What's the Matter With Eastern Kentucky?