A Quick Thematic Map of Alcohol Dependence in the World Using R Programming

Let’s use open data from the World Health Organization and a few lines of code in R to build a thematic map

Anyone who has ever worked in public health knows that the bosses like it when you present them with a map to describe a situation. Tables are kind of boring and hard to sometimes interpret, but maps can give a lot of information quickly. In this quick blog post, I’ll show you the few lines of code in R that you’ll need to create a nice thematic map to show the prevalence of alcohol dependence in the world using some open data from the World Health Organization.

(Yes, that’s a map of percent overweight in the header. You can map almost anything nowadays.)

First, the Data

The Global Health Observatory has a wealth of data that you can look at and download. For this project, I used data on alcohol dependence by country. You can use any data you want, actually. You just have to make sure that your data and your map data have a variable you can use to link them. More on that in a second.