Report 1: Replication Study of Chakraborty (2021)

This post reports on the status of the first major assignment of GEOG 0323, being a renanalysis of an existing reproduction study on a paper by Chakraborty (2021). The original paper, which was published early in the COVID-19 pandemic, examines the distribution of COVID-19 incidence and populations of people with disabilities at the county level. Professor Joseph Holler and colleagues authored the reproduction study, and the work of students in GEOG 0323 is to implement changes to the code and write-up of the RMarkdown file in order to provide small improvements.

The changes I made to the study are as follows:

• I fixed the position of a data table which was continuing off the page.
• I altered the arguements of one instance of a mapping function with the tmap package in order to show the entirety of the color ramp.
• I changed the transparency of points on a scatterplot to more clearly show outlier values.
• I added a paragraph to the end discussion based on the above point.
• I integrated information from two separate discussion sections (by Professor Holler and his colleague Emily, respectively) into one cohesive section. Only the last paragraph of the discussion was written by me.
• I added a conclusion section which provides a judgement of whether the reproduction was a success.

From completing this assignment, I have learned that integrating the thoughts of multiple authors can be a complicated process. I also learned about parameters in the kableExtra and the tmap R packages. The reproduction most clearly differs in the discussion section and the conclusion section, the latter of which did not exist in the previous version of the reproduction study. I would hope that these changes, along with small changes to three specific figures, are improvements to the study. In particular, I believe that forming one discussion section should improve the readability of the report and decrease time in which a reader moves from one discussion section to another to discern differences in content.

As stated by Emily in the discussion section, there are further opportunities to improve the study; notably, researchers could choose a more appropriate model for themes of “spatial dependence”. I look forward to learning more about said models in the future.

With respect to replication studies, researchers could use COVID-19 incidence from a different time period in the United States. Researchers could also use data from another country to investigate the relationship between the variables there.

Here is a link to the full repository for the reproduction study: https://github.com/andya17/RPr-Chakraborty-2021.

Here is a link to the report: https://andya17.github.io/RPr-Chakraborty-2021/.

Chakraborty, J. 2021. Social inequities in the distribution of COVID-19: An intra-categorical analysis of people with disabilities in the U.S. Disability and Health Journal 14 (1):101007. doi.org/10.1016/j.dhjo.2020.101007.