Introduction

Last week, I published a visualization that showed the rate of births for females, 15 to 19 years old in each state. I got a few request to cross that with how religious a state is or how educated they are so I made this new graphic. It shows that there is a relationship between the percentage of the populace that has a bachelor’s degree and the teen birth race in a state. Be sure to check out the visualization and the nerdy details below.

Visualization

Data Notes

The data for this visualization comes from the Center Disease Control, National Center for Health Statistics and the American Community Survey, which is conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. I found the data for birth rate on the CDC’s website The Census Bureau data can be found at American Fact Finder on table DP02. Once I had gathered the data, I used Excel to create a table and Tableau Public to create and host this visualization.

It is worth pointing out that the statistic for educational attainment is for the percentage of the population that is 25 years old or older. This means isn’t a perfect comparison and may actually be an effect, not a cause of the number of teens giving birth. This does give us an idea of what emphasis a state’s populace puts on educations As always though, correlation does not necessarily mean causation.

For those of you that are interested, I have included the linear regression model and statistics below.

Equation: Rate of Teen Pregnancy = -0.766912*% of Population with a bachelors degree + 62.4742

R-Squared: 0.327438

P-value: < 0.0001

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