Weekly Viz 2018-01-15

U.S. Household Income Distribution by State

About Makeover Monday

MakeoverMonday is a social data project: “Each week we post a link to a chart, and its data, and then you rework the chart. Maybe you retell the story more effectively, or find a new story in the data. We’re curious to see the different approaches you all take. Whether it’s a simple bar chart or an elaborate infographic, we encourage everyone of all skills to partake. Together we can have broader conversations about and with data.”

Starting from Jan 08, 2018, I decide to put aside one hour on Monday weekly to create some visualization and find some insights from the data.

The datasets are published each week at: MakeoverMonday Datasets.

Makeover Monday 0115

This week’s topic is to visualize the household income in the US by states from the U.S. Census Bureau. The below original viz could be found in this article.

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Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

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This chart clearly shows the households income distribution in each state. However, to my point, the shortages of this viz are:

• It ignores the year dimension in the dataset;
• It is ordered by the percentage of the number of “>150k” households only.

My Visualization

I spent about 45 mins from exploratory data analysis to visualization and analysis. I tried to incorporate household income distribution together with the number of households in each state. I also calculated the differences in the percentage of low income households (<50k) and high income households (>100k) from 2009 to 2016 in each state. Below is my dashboard:

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Please notice that all the visualizations are designed for desktop view, so it is recommended to view them on a desktop device.

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Interesting findings

• Simply looking at the total number of households, there is a pattern that the states on the coasts have larger population;
• North Dakota, D.C. and South Dakota show best progress from 2009 to 2016 as they show the highest decrease in low income households and highest increase in high income households. However, one must notice that as these three states/districts actually have relatively small number of total households, it’s more easy for them to get a boost in the percentages;
• Nevada did really poor on household income from 2009 to 2016 - it’s the only state seen a increase in the percentage of low income households, and its percentage of high income households almost stay the same.

Follow this link to find more weekly vizzes :)