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Canadian research study hits snag over lousy population data

It began with a simple question: Where are the hardest places to live in Canada?

 

The question had been tackled before, in the United States. Last summer, The New York Times published some stories and maps on “where Americans are healthy and wealthy, or struggling” (Clay County in Kentucky was deemed the country’s most difficult spot to live).

 

So this year some Canadian researchers at the Mowat Centre set out to replicate the idea, which was based on employment, median income, college education, disability, life expectancy and obesity data for 3,135 counties from the U.S. census.

 

Unfortunately, the project hit a snag: Canada has lousier data. The analysis could not be completed with the same level of detail as the U.S. effort. This country’s wealth data was bad. Its health data was worse.

 

“When we set out to create a map of the Hardest Places to Live in Canada, we wanted to create an interactive, evidence-based tool to encourage discussion about inequality,” the authors say in a paper to be released Thursday. “Given the challenges we encountered along the way, we shifted our focus to how the evidence needed to support that conversation is lacking.”

 

It is very difficult in Canada, they conclude, to make useful, community-level comparisons across the country using current survey data.

 

The result is a canvas of Canada that looks half finished.

 

Vast swathes of the Prairies – Saskatchewan and Manitoba – had to be left blank. So did much of Labrador.

 

READ MORE: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/canadian-research-study-hits-snag-over-lousy-population-data/article24298366/?cmpid=rss1&google_editors_picks=true