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closeInterested in Complete Data Set
Posted by plosmedicine on 30 Mar 2009 at 23:59 GMT
Author: Ruth Sponsler
Position: student
Institution: Greenville Technical College
E-mail: jk5554@yahoo.com
Submitted Date: September 13, 2006
Published Date: September 13, 2006
This comment was originally posted as a “Reader Response” on the publication date indicated above. All Reader Responses are now available as comments.
The open-source inclusion of a data set for this work is much appreciated.
However, the attached life expectancy spreadsheet (LE By County and Sex) for counties shows only aggregate life expectancy data for males and for females for the various years. I could not find columns for the racial, income, and geographic categories that are discussed in the article.
A more complete data set that includes LE figures for the various categories would be more useful to other researchers who may be interested in analyzing the data to analyze their possible hypotheses.
For example, if a researcher noted the high longevity in several Colorado counties and wished to further examine the effect of mean county elevation on life expectancy, the researcher would want to use data that is controlled for by race to eliminate confounding by the disparities that are discussed in the article.