The data used for this project comes from two sources. The first source is the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (NYC DoH) website. The second source is a national teen pregnancy report by Kathryn Kost and Stanley Henshaw from the Guttmacher Institute.
The NYC DoH makes available to the public a variety of data. It is tabulated and presented in graph, map, and table formats, the latter of which is downloadable in an Excel report. One can choose to display data from a long list of available metrics. However, it should be noted that only two variables can be selected for each report. Moreover, there is no explanation and/or definition of the labels used. For the birth data, the NYC DoH provides information for every year starting from 2000 to 2013. The variables one can choose from are grouped in three categories: Mother/Infant Characteristics, Mother’s Residence, and Birth Outcomes.
For the current analysis of the NYC teen births, data for 2000, 2006, and 2013 was used. Comparing figures six years apart made non-incremental changes more visible. The metrics selected were Mother’s Age in 9 categories, Mother’s Borough of Residence, and Neighborhood Poverty. The downloaded reports were culled and analyzed in Excel, excluding figures that did not pertain to teenage mothers. Thereafter, Tableau 9.1 was selected from the Digital Research Tools Directory as the visualization tool because of its relevance and ease of download and use. An assortment of chart types were experimented with, settling on area and line charts because of their most accurate visual presentation of data.
In order to make sense of the obtained information, other large cities were considered as candidates for comparisons. Los Angeles, the city closest in size to New York City (2010 Census populations of 3,792,621 and 8,175,133 respectively), was considered but decided against for various reasons. The main one was inability to capture the differences between urban and rural environments and their respective cultural, geographic, social, structural and economic differences that might affect teens’ access to reproductive resources. International comparisons were rejected for similar reasons. Thus, the NYC teenage births were compared to the national teen births.
The “U.S. Teenage Pregnancies, Births and Abortions, 2010: National and State Trends by Age, Race and Ethnicity” report from the Guttmacher Institute is an aggregation of the available national and state level data. The report consists of data tables, their analysis, and a discussion. The metrics of interest for this project were available from 1972 to 2010. This was the only report that consolidated state and national data. Other similar reports and publications had incomplete information or numbers that did not add up. Moreover, the Guttmacher Institute is an authority on sexual and reproductive health and produces quality work.
The data downloaded only includes live births; it does not include information on total pregnancies, abortions, miscarriages, or stillbirths. Therefore, total births are less than total pregnancies. The miscarriage rate is estimated to be the same throughout the United States, but the abortion rate is not. This means that total pregnancies should not be assumed from total births.
For the purpose of comparison of NYC total teen births to the available data on national total teen births, the years 2000, 2005, and 2010 were selected for this part of analysis. The same analysis methods were used for the national teen births data as for the NYC data.
