Racial Disparities and Air Quality

"People of color breathe more hazardous air. The sources are everywhere." - The New York Times.

As a part of our submission we wanted to investigate whether it is true that people of color and minority groups are negatively impacted by air quality. We wanted to see if we can find a relationship that could output a significant outcome that could be instrumental in changing environmental policy to generate a more equal and safe environment for people.

To investigate the relationship between racial disparities and air quality, we used two data sets from California Data Portal that showed the total count of different races per county in California as well as the air quality in each county measured by the indicator PM 2.5 mean.

Table Manipulation

We manipulated the diversity dataset to calculate the percent of minority groups in a county as measured as the total count of different races that are non-white as a percent of the total population in each county. This is evident in the last column of the table.

We then took two measures of environmental indicators of air and drinking water and then decided to focus on water quality as it seemed to have a greater impact on minorities and we want to focus on large racial disparities.

Visualization

The plot of air quality (as indexed by PM 2.5 mean) as a function of the Diversity index is seen below.

Statistical Manipulations

We predicted an exponential relationship between percent diversity and air pollution so we decided to scale the air pollution index on a logarithmic scale so that we could predict a correlation between the two variables. The correlation coefficient is below as well as a line of best fit of the logarithmic scaled plot.

We then bootstrapped the data so that we could be confident in our correlation coefficient. We resampled the data and found a 95% confidence interval. The confidence interval we created does not include 0 as a correlation coefficient so we were able to conclude that our correlation coefficient 0.53 is statistically significant.

Conclusion

Through data analysis we were able to conclude that there is a relationship between air quality and increased amount of minority groups in the California State. Furthermore, the next steps to try to understand and solve this problem, we would to determine causal relationship with income, tax allocation, hospitalixaxtion rates, among others.

Link to our code for further viewing: https://deepnote.com/@amelia-02e7/Welcome-40fea149-0aac-4e0d-aa35-6b4eced5428e