nids-stories
I always like to look for human stories within datasets. I thought it would be fun to explore the National Income Dynamics Survey since it is a panel that has been run every two years since 2008. It tracks approximately 30,000 people. Most researchers use this data to answer serious questions about poverty and employment. I'm looking to track families over the years and narrate their lives. A baby is born. A child graduates from school. The breadwinner loses his job. A parent falls ill.
Unfortunately, I am not allowed to distribute the data files directly. If you want to run this code, head over to the Data First catalogue to download it. I have included a sample of the two data files here and here.
As a first step, I have been playing around with graphing families. Here is an example of a large family:
The orange circles represent males, the purple females. Dotted lines refer to people who are not resident in the household. Edge relationships that aren't labeled refer to "x is mother of y" or "x is father of "y".