13/6/2023

The idea for this project was to understand if there was an association, at the county level, between social vulnerability and mental health outcomes. To assess this, I used two publicly available datasets. The CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) and the University of Wisconsin’s County Health Rankings . SVI is an index that quantifies social vulnerability which “refers to the potential negative effects on communities caused by external stresses on human health.” The County Health Rankings “measures the health of nearly all counties in the nation and ranks them within states. The Rankings are compiled using county-level measures from a variety of national and state data sources. These measures are standardized and combined using scientifically-informed weights.”