Journal

Not much to report this week. I organized everything for my paper, and I’ve been thinking about the direction of my research. I honestly think I might continue with the same dataset because, even though I got a lot of feedback on my original question and extracted some good information from it, I still want to look into the actual quality of these schools. So I’ll try digging into that, maybe incorporating location data too since I have longitude coordinates. I could explore whether someone was posting in the morning or night, since I believe that might have played into things.

Knowing that 87% of students were shot while school was in session and 13% when school was out of session, what can we say about these schools?

• • Overall quality (maybe mental illness status for students?)
  • Weapon types that are frequent
  • What it says about states and how they take care of their students
    • Centers, initiatives, opportunities

Sorry about the late entry, professor. I thought I submitted it last Friday but today realized I never actually posted. Basically, that week I was still working on my research questions and how they relate to age and weapon type. I wanted to see the relationship seasons played with age, since a lot of the high schoolers would either be in or out of school depending on the season, and later if they showed correlation I would’ve gone into the potential weapon types. This way I could potentially say something along the lines of “there are concentrated weapon types circulating around kids as they’re in or out of school” and identify which states had the worst of it.

Unfortunately though, my hypothesis was that the reason there were a lot of teenagers shot was because they were out of school during summer (July-August), when supervision is lower and they have more unsupervised time. However, my analysis disproved my hypothesis.

The data actually showed:

• 83% of fatal police shootings of minors occur during the school session (September-June)
• Only 17% occur during summer break (July-August)

Since I now know that most shootings happened while school was in session I think I might transition into possibly finding out the quality of these schools to see if I could say anything further maybe how lack of good schools are the reason

This week I tweaked my question to focus on seasons to see if I could possibly explain the amount of young people being shot and if there’s anything to say about the potential weapons they had and if this relates to the school.

This week I helped someone and Erika with their individual projects. I walked them through the introduction to pandas and demonstrated how to manipulate a data frame. I even had to explain what a data frame was from the basics.

I also worked on my own data analysis since there was some conceptual overlap with what we were discussing. Below are my key findings, which also addressed what Erika was wondering about:

QUESTION 1: Which state has the most shootings?

Top 5 States by Number of Shootings:

1. California (CA): 1,405 shootings
2. Texas (TX): 1,010 shootings
3. Florida (FL): 672 shootings
4. Arizona (AZ): 461 shootings
5. Georgia (GA): 393 shootings

Answer: California has the most shootings with 1,405 incidents.

Hello Professor Davis,

This week I focused on setting up my Python environment and planning which libraries to use for the project. I have experience with Matplotlib and feel confident with the basics, so I already have a rough idea of how to do what i want to do with the data visualization. Currently, my knowledge is primarily limited to bar graphs and scatter plots. Over the weekend, I plan to explore Matplotlib’s capabilities to see what other visualization options are available. If needed, I’ll adjust my quetsions to align with my current skill level. Enjoy the weekend.

Best regards,

Ben

Hello Professor Davis,

This week I was mainly trying to focus on questions. I’ve been trying to make a separate column of questions that I have that I can infer from the sheet and do some outside research to answer, and also just questions I know/think I can solve directly by manipulating data. Along with that, I’m still deciding if I want to use Python since I’m already proficient in it, or try something new and learn R. That’s all.

Best,

Ben

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