Examining the Relationship Between People who Only Speak English and People who have Graduated College
When you think of prominent relationships between two variables, you might think of the relationship between poverty and income. Lower income results in higher poverty. There is one relationship that exists between two variables that you probably have never considered. I will be examining the relationship that exists between the percentage of people who only speak English and the percent of people that are college graduates. The relationship between these two variables is one that I personally did not think would even exist before I discovered it when going through the process of deciding what to do for this assignment. I think this relationship is one that would definitely qualify as unusual because it would be logical to assume that these variables really have nothing to do with each other. To determine just how strong or weak this relationship is between these variables, I used some Python tools to create a visualization of the relationship and will display that visualization soon.
I used the “us_counties.csv” file to find two county-level variables that have a relationship between them. People who only speak English and people who have graduated college stood out to me. I created a scatterplot of the data. Here is that scatterplot.
As you can see, while there might not be an incredibly strong relationship between these variables, it seems like one does exist. I would argue that there might be some reverse causation going on here. I think that an increase in college graduates leads to a decrease in english only speakers. I think that because people tend to learn new languages throughout college and when they graduate they are no longer only speaking English. The calculated slope parameter for this scatterplot is -0.10, meaning a 1% increase in English Only correlates to a 0.10% decrease in College Grads.