by Aliyah Adegun and Keona Banks

Our experience working on this project has been both rewarding and challenging. Learning how to use Tableau to analyze and visualize data was a satisfying experience and we feel good that we now have a new skill to add to our resume and to utilize in the future. However, it was not without its difficulties as we encountered some bumps along the way. Our project focused on the life expectancy data of Maryland from 2007-2017. This dataset came from the from the Maryland Department of Health. When we got the data we didn’t expect to have as many gaps and missing data as it did. Our data was missing data for certain demographics such as White Hispanic, Native American  and Asian  populations. This is very significant data as White Hispanic  make up 18.7%; of Maryland's population and Asians alone makes up  6%, and Native American is .7%. The exclusion of this data doesn’t paint a clear picture of the life expectancy in Maryland. In addition the gender was not included as a variable in our data set and that is usually information that is included in demographics. So because of their limitations this data really only shows how Black and White residents compare in Maryland.  

Read the full report here.