Over the past two weeks, I have been going to the Injury Prevention Center quite frequently and working with Garry on the data that he gave me. He has given me a published paper on how the IPV has categorized and analyzed the data; therefore I have been using this paper as a guide. The data that has been given to me contains 5 years (2007-2012) of all pediatric traumas that have occurred. The information is extensive and contains information such as age, gender, ethnicity, time, place, injury type, and etc. Because this data base is owned by Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, the data itself is private and cannot go out into the public unless it is shown as a visualization.
The first priority is to organize the data as shown in Using Trauma Registry Data to Guide Injury Prevention Program Activities. By grouping information together such as age and injury severity, we can better see the correlation between different age groups and the result of the injury. By the time I am finished I will hope to have the trauma patients’ demographics, the cause of injury by mean age, temporal characteristics, injury severity, injury location, injury intent and mechanism, and injury location.
Next, as we move along in the class, I will then start making charts that will showcase the information that is interactive but also easy for the public to understand. For instance, I would group together injury types and display which types of injuries are more prevalent, and add other information such as age groups most affected. Here is an example of an interactive chart that could be helpful: Health Chart
As well as injury information, creating maps would also be helpful in looking at cities and locations where injuries often occur. The authors of the Trauma paper, used ArcGIS to map cities in Connecticut, but it would also be beneficial for the map to be interactive as well. Here would be an example: Health Map
Ray – Good to see you making progress with the rich data from your community partner, which of course cannot be shared unless aggregated to protect individual-level confidentiality.
For your next steps, I recommend that you first work on creating an interactive map of injury frequency by town (your second idea above), because this has a clearer focus that matches our seminar work this week. To do this, you will need an aggregated list of injury frequency types by town. We’ll discuss more in seminar.