What is this?

Background

Social capital is defined as “connections among individuals – social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them.” (Putnam, 2000: 19). Since the introduction of social capital in social science, many other disciplines vigorously examined the impact of social capital on a variety of socioeconomic factors (Chilenski & Summers, 2016).

Agenda

This visualization project aims to examine the relationship between social capital and Covid-19 for each U.S. state. It aimed for scholarly audiences in the realm of public policy.

Data Source

This proejct utilize datas from two different sources:

1. State-Level Social Capital Index: Social Capital Project by the United States Congress Joint Economic Committee

2. State-Level Covid-19 Statistics: COVID-19 Data Repository by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University

Description

Visualization #1

This plot visualizes the performance metrics related to Covid-19 for each state in the United States.

The first metric, Fatality, is also referred to as Case Fatality Ratio (CFR). This metric estimates the proportion of deaths among identified confirmed cases.

The second metric, Positivity, estimates the proportion of identified confirmed relative to the size of population for each state.

Consequently, at this early stage of the pandemic, most estimates of fatality ratios have been based on cases detected through surveillance and calculated using crude methods, giving rise to widely variable estimates of CFR by state.

Description

Visualization #2

This plot visualizes the distribution of social capital index across the US.

The state social capital index includes seven dimensions:

1)Family Unity

2)Family Interaction

3)Social Support

4)Community Health

5)Institutional Health

6)Collective Efficacy

7)Philanthropic Health

The 12 states with the highest social capital scores are distributed across two continuous blocs: nine states running from Utah, through Wyoming and Colorado, across the Dakotas and Nebraska, and over to Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin; and the three Northern New England states of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. These states tend to rank highly across all seven subindices as well. Utah has the highest social capital score, followed by Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Of the 11 states with the lowest levels of social capital, ten of them fall within a contiguous bloc of states running from Nevada, across the Southwest and South over to Georgia and Florida. New York is the only state in the bottom 11 that is outside this group. Louisiana has the lowest social capital score, followed by Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico.

Description

Visualization #3

The plot visualizes the regression models examining the relationship between state-level social capital index and Covid-19 metrics. The regression lines display confidence interval of 0.95.

Call:
lm(formula = positivity ~ state_level_index, data = soccap_covid_clean)

Residuals:
     Min       1Q   Median       3Q      Max 
-0.08380 -0.04008 -0.01725  0.01454  0.17119 

Coefficients:
                   Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
(Intercept)        0.101338   0.009045  11.204 4.05e-15 ***
state_level_index -0.003086   0.009135  -0.338    0.737    
---
Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1

Residual standard error: 0.0646 on 49 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared:  0.002323,  Adjusted R-squared:  -0.01804 
F-statistic: 0.1141 on 1 and 49 DF,  p-value: 0.737

Call:
lm(formula = fatality ~ state_level_index, data = soccap_covid_clean)

Residuals:
      Min        1Q    Median        3Q       Max 
-0.010696 -0.003240 -0.001289  0.001981  0.014196 

Coefficients:
                    Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
(Intercept)        0.0162501  0.0007695  21.119   <2e-16 ***
state_level_index -0.0018560  0.0007771  -2.388   0.0208 *  
---
Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1

Residual standard error: 0.005495 on 49 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared:  0.1043,    Adjusted R-squared:  0.08599 
F-statistic: 5.704 on 1 and 49 DF,  p-value: 0.02083