Today, an article of mine on immunisation rates in Australia was published on SBS News. It explores the reasons why more educated parents have lower immunisation rates. The charts on the article were designed to be relatively simple to allow them to be digested by the general public.
However, for anyone that is interested in the underlying numbers and relationships, here are a couple of wonkish charts. These charts help to illustrate the relationship between education levels and vaccination rate.
First off, the scatter plot and linear regression function for education levels vs five-year vaccination rates.
The correlation coefficient between the variables is -0.28. Whilst this indicates a weak-ish relationship, I think it is one worth exploring, given that:
The chart above shows the distribution of the count of SA3s at different education levels. This chart is not population weighted. The vaccination rate for each education level is overlaid. This paints a fairly clear picture of how vaccination rates drop as education levels rise.
As an aside, I also create population-weighted charts to take into account the variation in populations seen in SA3s. The results were broadly similar, therefore in the interest of keeping the charts simple, I used the non-population weighted results.
However, for anyone that is interested in the underlying numbers and relationships, here are a couple of wonkish charts. These charts help to illustrate the relationship between education levels and vaccination rate.
First off, the scatter plot and linear regression function for education levels vs five-year vaccination rates.
The correlation coefficient between the variables is -0.28. Whilst this indicates a weak-ish relationship, I think it is one worth exploring, given that:
- The SA3-level data is the finest-grained data available for immunisation rates. These areas have populations in the range of about 10,000 to 170,000, meaning that the data is very noisy. Most areas will feature both rich and poor residents. SA4 data for immunisation would be great, but is not available publicly.
- This is social science data, therefore the data is inherently fuzzy
The chart above shows the distribution of the count of SA3s at different education levels. This chart is not population weighted. The vaccination rate for each education level is overlaid. This paints a fairly clear picture of how vaccination rates drop as education levels rise.
As an aside, I also create population-weighted charts to take into account the variation in populations seen in SA3s. The results were broadly similar, therefore in the interest of keeping the charts simple, I used the non-population weighted results.
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