Welcome to the second of a series of posts exploring the data from the 2015 Veterinary Economics Career and Family Survey.  We're gonna pick up where we left off in Part 1...

All that said and done, here’s the truly valuable part of this. Everything so far has been my interpretation.  I could have made mistakes.  Even if I didn’t, each person out there has their own set of priorities, their own questions, and their own way of looking at this data to answer the questions most relevant to them.

So, because the editor of Veterinary Economics understands that, and is incredibly brave, he trusted me to make veterinary economics research accessible and reproducible using R, a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics.  R’s extensive documentation, speed and low overhead have resulted in a large developer community, so many economics packages are available and fully supported.  Its’ accessibility, deep documentation and the degree to which it facilitates reproducible research have resulted in wide uptake among the research community.

For example, here’s a scatterplot matrix showing the correlation between gender, debt, median household income:

The code that generated the matrix is in this public GitHub repository along with the data itself. And the survey instrument used to generate the data. So now everyone can conduct their own analysis, repeat mine to see how I got the results I did, or perform my analysis on other data sets

Note that some fields have been omitted from the public dataset.  Data regarding hours worked before and after children joining the family, and all metrics around practice ownership will be added over the next several months.  Some fields have been omitted purposely to prevent individual respondents from being identified. Omitted data is available for research that preserves this anonymity*

I look forward to seeing others’ analysis of this data. Data grows more valuable when it is shared with others, because the more people who analyze it, the richer and more comprehensive is our understanding not only of the data, but also of each others’ priorities and capabilities for using it.

Stay tuned for more; and veterinarians wishing to join the conversation should message Eden or me to join Vets4Change on Facebook.