The social justice issue that data science can aid with is life expectancy throughout the world. The social justice issue is a project that was brought to the world’s attention by Hans Rosling, and you can see his presentation on Youtube in the references. He compared the life expectancy to the Gross Domestic Product per capita (GPD) of the countries, and plotting the data found a strong correlation between GDP and the life span of the Country’s citizens. The first discovery was the life span increases with GDP; however, there is a cluster of Countries in the middle of that range that vary drastically in life expectancy even though each Country has similar GDP. The conclusion was how the money had been used in that particular Country determined the populations’ life span. A data scientist can replicate this research in a non-profit today, and programs can be created from the data to aid select countries through education and services.
The data sources are open source and can download from the World Bank, United Nations, and The Institute for Health Metrics (IHME) and Evaluation, see attached references. The World Bank site has the GDP per capita in US dollars from 1960 to 2017 for a large portion of countries, and the download is very convenient in Excel or XML format. The IHME has the Life Expectancy and Probability of Death data and many more datasets for research. The United Nations has a lot of data, maps, graphs to use, and open-source data, and this research use the 2017 World Population Prospects data.
This research had been previously done, and new studies can easily be derived from the original analysis using new and current data by adding additional data to this, such as access to clean water, education, diseases, food supplies, political, access to healthcare, and other economic open-source data. A non-profit such as Water for people could easily use this data to focus efforts around the world to bring clean drinking water and proper sanitary water solutions to nations with lower life expectancy.
References
Gapminder. (n.d.). Interactive map. Retrieved from: https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$chart-type=bubbles
Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). (October 6, 2016). Life expectancy & probability of death. Retrieved from: http://www.healthdata.org/data-visualization/life-expectancy-probability-death
United Nations. (n.d.) World population prospects 2017. Retrieved from: https://population.un.org/wpp/
The World Bank. (2019). GDP per capita (current US$). Retrieved from: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD
Water for People. (2019). Our mission, retrieved from: https://www.waterforpeople.org/about/#mission
Youtube. (January 16, 2017). The best stats you’ve ever seen – Hans Rosling. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w