1950 Census by County of Live Birth Rates



    For this map I downloaded two county level datasets from NHGIS and joined them with this historical county shape file for the year 1950. Two of the datasets I thought would make for an interesting map and analysis were the live birth rates by race and the age census of people twenty-one and up. I'm not sure if I fully thought this through when I chose these. I was hoping I would be able to see a correlation between birth rates, race, and age, but I realized that these two datasets weren't quite what I needed to be able to make a reasonable hypothesis on that topic. So I chose to only show the live birth rates, which still didn't display as much information as I had hoped. During this process I did realize just how important it is to normalize the field for comparison, before normalizing the data it appeared that there were almost no "White" live births in all of South Carolina...this obviously didn't make sense.  
    
Fg. 1 Non-White Live Births per County / Total Population 






Fg.2 White Live Births per County/ Total Population




At first, I was surprised by the data that I was seeing. When there are much higher mortality rates during births in the African American communities versus white, why is this map indicating a different outcome? Then I realized that the biggest issue with this dataset is that there are only two variables, white and non-white. The Eurocentric basis of this census data from 1950 does not surprise me but it is very frustrating that so many groups of people got lumped together in one group, non-white, devoid of identity. Though there is still some information you can gain from this map, I feel that the lack of variables to compare to the total population does not allow for a holistic analysis of live birth rates by race in 1950. 

Comments

  1. Madeleine BlazeSeptember 27, 2023 at 7:06 AM

    I think this distribution is really interesting to think about! Although there are only two variables and the non-white category not only diminishes identity and demographic information, I feel like it might also contain a large portion of the population size that would impact the data. I think another thing to think about is that when you normalized the data by total population, that includes biologically male individuals and I wonder if that has an effect on the presentation of the data.

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