Jordan Landrum

Research Report

My research was fixed on the increasing rate of maternal mortality among incarcerated women. Additional topics of this study might include the mortality rate of children birthed by incarcerated women, the location these women are from and where their prison is located, increasing the mortality rate of incarcerated women of color, as well as subsidiary factors that affect the health of imprisoned women. Previously recorded/public access data was analyzed for causation variables of this high mortality rate and will be presented with information collected by analyzing the most recent literary sources regarding this topic.

During my research, I was tasked with searching for information, downloading data sets, and conducting data management/cleaning. I began with the maternal mortality rates overall in the U.S., then moved on to finding information of the incarcerated population of females – also by state in the United States. After consulting my advisor, Professor Obasanjo, I then understood more about the statistical analysis that would need to happen at the end of the data collection process. But first, I would need to gather the control variable for our research which we decided upon as the poverty and unemployment rate for minorities (which ended up just being African Americans in this case) and the overall rate of drug use per state. At this point, I have now collected all of these variables and am working to merge the data sets and find a way to present them on a map.

The regression analysis portion of the work will likely be completed by my advisor once I provide her with the master copy of merged information. The timeline for this research is 1997-2017, however, the control variables are only for a median year because some of the information had to be collected from the census bureau.