Student Activity

What is a socio-economic factor in this investigation?

We are looking for factors that you would hypothesise have had an impact on slowing population growth. In this investigation, we are looking for data to confirm what we would expect based on the demographic transition model and your understanding of population dynamics. These examples cover many different data types in Gapminder.

Examples include:

• Literacy
• Years in school
• Use of contraception
• Health care availability
• Disease
• Income
• Female employment
• Human Development Index

What is a demographic factor in this investigation?

We are looking for factors that you would hypothesise would indicate slowing population growth and socio-economic status. These examples cover several data types in Gapminder.

Examples include:

• Crude birth rate
• Crude death rate
• total fertility rate
• infant mortality
• life expectancy

Step 1

PRELIMINARY RESEARCH - Use Gapminder Tools to check if two factors have a relationship - test your hypothesis. The socio-economic factor should be on the x axis (independent variable) and the demographic factor on the y axis (dependent variable) as you are hypothesising that the socio-economic factor changes are having an impact on the demographic factor.

Step 2

Finalise your RESEARCH QUESTION. It should look something like this:

"To what extent is the crude birth rate of a country impacted by the level of literacy in females?"

Step 3

Research and write about 100 - 200 words explaining the CONTEXT of your research. Explain why you are looking at the relationship between these two factors.

Step 4

Decide upon your SAMPLING STRATEGY. You need to collect sufficient data to answer your question. The minimum number of countries to include in your analysis is 30 countries to provide enough data to have more validity in your conclusions. You need to decide how to sample the available data. One method is to include all countries which are common in both data sets (maximum available sample size). Another method is to randomly sample the countries based on a random number selection or a method based on the alphabet. Finally, you may want to choose countries based on some other data, such as the income bracket of a country. You could use the World Bank Open Data for this. You should be aware that this may bias your data but it is a valid sampling strategy.

Step 5

Go to Gapminder Data and download your data. For an Independent Investigation you should consider that there are other sources for such data and that it might be worth finding multiple sources of data for your investigation then calculating means of the data. The data comes as an Excel or csv file and you should check that you can access the data.

Choose data from one common year in both sets of data. Try to find the most recent common year with lots of data. If you need to use two different years, then you will need to comment on this in your evaluation of the data.

Copy the data into one file with three columns. 

Edit the data so that you have the data aligned correctly for each country (this is trickier than you might think). Allow about 30 minutes.

Step 6

Plot a scatter graph of your data. Add a trendline and the R2 value. Improve the presentation of your graph with an informative title, labels on the axis and gridlines that aid interpretation. Excel does not name the countries on the scatter plot and so you need to use your data table to identify any particular points on your graph. In order to have your socio-economics factor on the axis axis, it should be in your first column of data.

Here is an example

Here's a video to help. Please note that the gridlines should be retained and the series label removed.

Here's a video to add the trendline and R² value with a nice explanation of what the R² value means.

Step 7

Identify 3 countries which you will use to discuss your data and the pattern that it demonstrates.  Research some background information about these countries, such as their position in the demographic transition model and the population policies in place in these countries. You could also check their Sustainable Development Goal setting (SDGs). You may want to include a Gapminder bubble graph to enhance your discussion of the data as this gives you additional information such as population size and geographical region. You could also find a population pyramid and a predicted population pyramid for the three countries you elaborate upon.

Step 8 

Complete your report. It should include:

• Context - What are you investigating and why?
• Research Question
• Sampling Strategy - how are you investigating your RQ
• Data - Graph of data with trendline and R² value
• Data Analysis - Description of the trend and statistical support for the correlation.
• Discussion - Put the trend into context with the use of 3 countries and how they fit or do not fit the pattern seen.
• Future Research - how could you take this further and what would you improve?
• References / Bibliography (have you in-text cited?_
• Appendix - include a data table of your data