The connection between the rate of High School completion and Alcoholism in the United States

In the modern day, where data analysis across vast arrays of data is conducted in search of common or unique, socioeconomic data often houses both. When sitting down and looking at the overwhelming amount of data on US counties, one can have various takeaways. Amongst the various variables, there are quite a few correlations that one may not consider without pouring through the data themselves. While doing so, a relationship I encountered, was that of High School completion rates and Alcoholism in the United States. Seeing this unique correlation left me wondering, do High School Completion rates and Alcohol-Impaired driving deaths hold as strong of a relationship?

In the pursuit of finding unusual or unique relationships within data, an analyst must first begin with the process of statistical analysis. A good rule of thumb to identify a strong relationship when conducting statistical analysis is to find correlations that contain coefficients of 0.2 and greater, or -0.2 and less. While performing analysis, the coefficient of correlation, 0.55, arose for the relationship between High School completion rates and Alcoholism in the United States. Before seeing these figures, I was not thinking of a possible relationship between these two. This is primarily due to the fact that the relationship is not a common or typical one. For example, it is not a relationship that could be put in the same boat as College Completion rates and Income, for these relationships are more or less self-explanatory. For the most part, a strong correlation between variables such as High School Completion rates, and Alcoholism is not blatantly obvious. I would argue this is quite intriguing, given that the correlation has a coefficient as high as 0.55.

In comparison, High School Completion rates and Alcohol-Impaired driving deaths had a weaker relationship with a correlation coefficient of 0.13. There could be a few takeaways from these results. An initial takeaway I came to was that, while there are strong correlations between High School Completion rates and Excessive drinking, as well as High School Completion rates and Alcohol-impaired driving deaths, individuals are behind the wheel less often when impaired via alcohol, regardless of college or high school completion rate. There could be various factors that are applicable and worth looking into outside of the data. For instance, qualitative data, such as the purpose of excessive drinking, could play a major role in how relevant the variable is to its counterpart, in this case High School completion rate.