Degree Type
Honors Capstone Project
Date of Submission
Spring 5-1-2014
Capstone Advisor
Professor Stuart Thorson
Honors Reader
Professor Frederick F. Carriere
Capstone Major
Political Science
Capstone College
Arts and Science
Audio/Visual Component
no
Capstone Prize Winner
no
Won Capstone Funding
no
Honors Categories
Social Sciences
Subject Categories
Other Political Science | Political Science
Abstract
Discussion rarely takes a dispassionate view of North Korea and its people, and ingrained aversion to the idea of promoting a better understanding of the state distracts from serious, empirical study of the population. This research makes use of the 2008 North Korean census, an extensive set of fifty-three tables, which received little attention and remained in PDF format. This research project first translates and publishes machine-readable formats of the census data and then employs R statistical programming to create visualizations of select tables and conduct simple data analysis, including p-tests and Mantel-Haenzel tests. Males and urban residents were found to be less likely to suffer physical impairment than females and rural residents, allowing us to reject the null hypothesis that there is no proportional variation. Maternal mortality ratios are found to differ across provinces and are lowest in Pyongyang. Governments and humanitarian aid organizations can use these findings to effectively target vulnerable populations. This study sets precedence for further analysis of the 2008 North Korean census.
Recommended Citation
Linhorst, Molly, "Visualizing the "Hermit Kingdom" Graphing, Mapping, and Analyzing the 2008 North Korean Census" (2014). Honors Capstone Projects - All. 809.
https://surface.syr.edu/honors_capstone/809
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
