Gapminder country compare analysis

gapminder country comparison

You have seen the gapminder dataset that has data on life expectancy, population, and GDP per capita for 142 countries from 1952 to 2007. To get a glimpse of the dataframe, namely to see the variable names, variable types, etc., we use the glimpse function. We also want to have a look at the first 20 rows of data.

glimpse(gapminder)
## Rows: 1,704
## Columns: 6
## $ country   <fct> "Afghanistan", "Afghanistan", "Afghanistan", "Afghanistan", …
## $ continent <fct> Asia, Asia, Asia, Asia, Asia, Asia, Asia, Asia, Asia, Asia, …
## $ year      <int> 1952, 1957, 1962, 1967, 1972, 1977, 1982, 1987, 1992, 1997, …
## $ lifeExp   <dbl> 28.8, 30.3, 32.0, 34.0, 36.1, 38.4, 39.9, 40.8, 41.7, 41.8, …
## $ pop       <int> 8425333, 9240934, 10267083, 11537966, 13079460, 14880372, 12…
## $ gdpPercap <dbl> 779, 821, 853, 836, 740, 786, 978, 852, 649, 635, 727, 975, …
head(gapminder, 20) # look at the first 20 rows of the dataframe
## # A tibble: 20 × 6
##    country     continent  year lifeExp      pop gdpPercap
##    <fct>       <fct>     <int>   <dbl>    <int>     <dbl>
##  1 Afghanistan Asia       1952    28.8  8425333      779.
##  2 Afghanistan Asia       1957    30.3  9240934      821.
##  3 Afghanistan Asia       1962    32.0 10267083      853.
##  4 Afghanistan Asia       1967    34.0 11537966      836.
##  5 Afghanistan Asia       1972    36.1 13079460      740.
##  6 Afghanistan Asia       1977    38.4 14880372      786.
##  7 Afghanistan Asia       1982    39.9 12881816      978.
##  8 Afghanistan Asia       1987    40.8 13867957      852.
##  9 Afghanistan Asia       1992    41.7 16317921      649.
## 10 Afghanistan Asia       1997    41.8 22227415      635.
## 11 Afghanistan Asia       2002    42.1 25268405      727.
## 12 Afghanistan Asia       2007    43.8 31889923      975.
## 13 Albania     Europe     1952    55.2  1282697     1601.
## 14 Albania     Europe     1957    59.3  1476505     1942.
## 15 Albania     Europe     1962    64.8  1728137     2313.
## 16 Albania     Europe     1967    66.2  1984060     2760.
## 17 Albania     Europe     1972    67.7  2263554     3313.
## 18 Albania     Europe     1977    68.9  2509048     3533.
## 19 Albania     Europe     1982    70.4  2780097     3631.
## 20 Albania     Europe     1987    72    3075321     3739.

Your task is to produce two graphs of how life expectancy has changed over the years for the country and the continent you come from.

I have created the country_data and continent_data with the code below.

country_data <- gapminder %>% 
            filter(country == "China") # just choosing Greece, as this is where I come from

continent_data <- gapminder %>% 
            filter(continent == "Asia")

First, create a plot of life expectancy over time for the single country you chose. Map year on the x-axis, and lifeExp on the y-axis. You should also use geom_point() to see the actual data points and geom_smooth(se = FALSE) to plot the underlying trendlines. You need to remove the comments # from the lines below for your code to run.

 plot1 <- ggplot(country_data, mapping = aes(x = year , y = lifeExp))+
   geom_point() +
   geom_smooth(se = FALSE)


#Next we need to add a title. Create a new plot, or extend plot1, using the `labs()` function to add an informative title to the plot.


 plot1<- plot1 +
   labs(title = " Life Expectancy Over Time in China",
       x = "Year ",
       y = "Life Expectancy ") 


# plot1

Secondly, produce a plot for all countries in the continent you come from. (Hint: map the country variable to the colour aesthetic. You also want to map country to the group aesthetic, so all points for each country are grouped together).

 ggplot(continent_data, mapping = aes(x = country  , y = lifeExp  , colour= country , group = country))+
   geom_point() + 
   geom_smooth(se = FALSE) 

Finally, using the original gapminder data, produce a life expectancy over time graph, grouped (or faceted) by continent. We will remove all legends, adding the theme(legend.position="none") in the end of our ggplot.

ggplot(data = gapminder , mapping = aes(x = year  , y = lifeExp  , colour= continent ))+
   geom_point() + 
   geom_smooth(se = FALSE) +
   facet_wrap(~continent) +
   theme(legend.position="none") 

Given these trends, what can you say about life expectancy since 1952? Again, don’t just say what’s happening in the graph. Tell some sort of story and speculate about the differences in the patterns.

Generally speaking, life expectancy across all continents have seen in increase since 1952, though certain countries have had small setbacks in the process. For example, China’s life expectancy had a fall from 1957 to 1967. I think that was because of the “Great Leap Forward Movement”, which caused the Great Chinese Famine and drastically decreased China’s population and life expectancy.