Getting a first look at your data

We will work with two datasets in this chapter: The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth for 1997, a survey conducted by the United States government that surveyed the same group of individuals from 1997 through 2023; and the counts of COVID-19 cases and deaths by country from Our World in Data.

Getting ready…

We will mainly be using the pandas library for this recipe. We will use pandas tools to take a closer look at the National Longitudinal Survey (NLS) and COVID-19 case data.

Data note

The NLS of Youth was conducted by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. This survey started with a cohort of individuals in 1997 who were born between 1980 and 1985, with annual follow-ups each year through to 2023. For this recipe, I pulled 89 variables on grades, employment, income, and attitudes toward government from the hundreds of data items in the survey. Separate files for SPSS, Stata, and SAS can be downloaded from...