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Eduardo Santoyo
COH 602
National University
January 6, 2016
GENDER AND ER VISITS 2
The question being addressed in this analysis, Is there a relationship between gender and
number of visits to the Emergency Room? To assess this relationship properly, one would need
to look at other possible variables that would have an effect on the correlation between the
primary variables. One must look at how all of these variables and how they would lead to
conclude whether a correlation presents itself, and if so, is there statistically significant evidence
to prove these correlations exist? One of the other factors that were taken into consideration was
This project used the data set, COH602, which is a subset of the variables from the Kaiser
Permanente Study of the Oldest Old Survey in the SAS Web Editor program.
First, a PROC CONTENTS was conducted with the SAS Web Editor to determine what
variables would be available for this project to analyze. Here are some of the variables that were
available to analyze.
COHORT Cohort
RACE SUM*race
SEX SUM*sex
The 2011-2012 Data Dictionary (Regents of University of California, 2013) provides the
6 = Unspecified
Sex was gender which was coded as 0 = Female and 1 = Male
The number of visits to the ER ranged from 0 to 53 visits occurring between a designated
period of time
Living in a nursing home was coded as 0 = No and 1 = Yes.
Frequency
We first computed the frequency distributions for the following variables (AGEIN71, SEX,
and VISSUM1) using a PROC FREQ procedure in SAS. The SEX variable was divided into
either Female (0) or Male (1). The AGEIN71 variable had a range of values that started at 65
years to 95 years of age. The VISSUM1 described the number of visits to the emergency room
Table 1
Sample Demographics
(N = 6000)
Age
AGEIN Cumulative Cumulative
71 Frequency Percent Frequency Percent
VisitstoER
M1 Frequency Percent
Gender
Cumulative Cumulative
SEX Frequency Percent Frequency Percent
Statistics
For this inferential data analysis, I have chosen to run a PROC CORR DATA procedure
to see if there is a correlation between the three variables (age of the cohort in 1971, visits to the
ER, and sex). According to Sullivan (2012), in correlation analysis, we quantify the association
between two continuous variables. The strength of the correlation coefficient is an indicator of
the strength of association between the variables. For this analysis, we conducted procedures
between: age of gender vs. number of ER visits, age vs. gender, and age vs. number of ER visits.
We wanted to see if there was any statically significant correlation between two of the variables.
Table 2
GENDER AND ER VISITS 7
Correlations
AGEIN71 SEX
AGEIN71 VISSUM1
0.0027
2877 2601
VISSUM1 SEX
Discussion
With the descriptive statistics shown in Table 1, we can see that a majority of the cohort
in 1971 were 75 years old with a frequency of 270, or 9.38%. For the number of visits to the
emergency room, the largest number were those who had no visits to the emergency room with a
frequency of 1502, or 26.9%. Looking at the sample population and gender was divided; we
have females with a frequency of 3006, or 50.18%, and males with a frequency of 2784, or
49.82%. Observing the division of gender, it is closely divided up equally in our sample
GENDER AND ER VISITS 9
population.
In working with correlations between variables, it must range between -1 and +1 and
quantifies the direction and strength of the linear association between the two variables
(Sullivan, 2012). A value such as 0.9 suggests a strong, positive correlation and a value of -0.2
would lead us to believe there is a weak, negative correlation. When a correlation is presented
as being closer to zero, it suggests that there is no linear association between two continuous
variables. The results show that there is no linear association between the two variables of age of
cohort in 1971 and visits to the emergency room. The value of 0.058 helps to support this
analysis. There is no linear association between the variables of sex and visits to the emergency
room with a value of 0.022. There was also no correlated association between age of the cohort
in 1971 and sex. This correlation had a value of 0.018. With all three correlational relationships
being so close to zero, there seemed to be no strong linear correlation. So we can conclude that
there is no statistically significant correlation between gender and the number of visits to the
emergency room.
SAS Code
The following the code used in SAS to provide the results for the project analysis:
RUN;
PROC CORR DATA=mydata.old;
VAR agein71 vissum1;
RUN;
PROC CORR DATA=mydata.old;
VAR vissum1 SEX;
RUN;
References
Regents of University of California. (2013) California Health Interview Survey Data Dictionary.
file/Documents/CHIS_2011-2012_Data_Dictionary_PUF-ADULT.pdf