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.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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