IA idea · Health, biology & medicine
Do more doctors mean fewer infant deaths?
Research question
Across countries, how strongly is infant mortality related to the number of physicians per 1,000 people, and does the relationship remain after accounting for income?
Adapt it: change the place, the data or the comparison until the question is yours.
Why it makes a good exploration
Health systems decide where to spend money. Testing a simple relationship, then seeing how much of it is really about wealth, teaches careful statistical thinking.
The mathematics you'll need
- Scatter plots and logarithmic transformations
- Correlation and regression
- Controlling for a third variable by grouping
- Spearman's rank
Course labels show where a technique sits; using maths from outside your course is fine if you explain it clearly and say it is new to you.
Where the data comes from
Infant mortality, physicians per 1,000 and GDP per capita from the World Bank.
- World Bank Open Data — Development indicators (GDP, life expectancy, mortality, internet use) for every country, usually from 1960.
- WHO Global Health Observatory — 1,000+ health indicators by country (immunisation, mortality, risk factors).
Cite every source in a footnote where you use it and in your bibliography. Check the licence of any dataset you download.
A possible outline
- Define the variables and years.
- Explore the raw relationship.
- Transform and model.
- Group by income and repeat.
- Reflect on confounding and data quality.
Pitfalls that cost marks
- Claiming causation.
- Mixing years across countries.
- Ignoring missing values.
Showing personal engagement
- Locate your own country.
- Investigate an outlier.
- Discuss policy implications carefully.
See Criterion C: personal engagement for what examiners look for.
Taking it further
Compare with nurses and midwives per 1,000 and discuss which matters more.