The HRA calculator was designed to allow you to look at data without having to use a commercial statistics package such as SPSS or SAS. This tutorial will teach you how to use, interperet and download the information that the calculator provides.

Please click the arrow below to continue.

 

 

Selecting Variables

First you need to determine what variable(s) you want to examine. A listing of variables and their possible responses can be found in the data dictionary.

When you start using the calculator you are given two options. You can examine a single variable (ie: you want to know the percentage of people who are obese in your county) or you can look at multiple variables at once (ie: You want to know the percentage of obese people in your county who are smokers.)

If you decide to look at multiple variables it is important to think about what you are combining. Our system allows you to examine relationships between all questions included in the Health Risks Assessment. It is possible to combine two variables that have no logical connection. You could, for example, select "Does anyone in the household drink" and "How many servings of cereal do you eat a week?" Any relationship that may appear between these two variables would be spurious, or coincidental.

For this example, lets select two variables that might be related - "HHI" (household income) and "Employment Status"

The page should look like this:

 

Click the submit button once you have chosen your variables to see the resulting table.

 

Please click the arrow below to move on to interpretation of results.

 

Intro

Interpreting Results

 

Now that you have the table in front of you what does it mean? Lets look at it line by line.

The first row holds the column labels. These tell you what area you are looking at. The first label is "total". Numbers found in this column show the total number of times that a respose was found to be true across all counties. The next eight column labels list the counties of Western New York. Numbers found in these columns indicate the number of times a certain condition was found to be true in a specific county.

After the eight counties of WNY we list the supplimental sample areas. These columns are a different color than the main sample. Supplimental area numbers are not included in the total column and should not be combined with their county's numbers.

The second row lists the variables that we are looking at. "Yearly Household Income" is our main variable and "Employment Status" is our secondary variable.

The third row shows a value for our first variable. Like the label (Yearly household income), "Less than $10,000" is in bold. This row shows us the number of households that reported a household income of less than $10,000 in each county and supplimental sample area..

The fourth row shows us a value for our second variable. Like the label (Employment Status), "Employed full-time" is indented. This row shows us the number of people who reported a HHI of less than $10,000 that also reported being employed full time.

The fifth row shows us the number of people who reported a HHI of less than $10,000 that also reported being employed part time. The sixth row shows us the number of people who reported a HHI of less than $10,000 that did not report their employment status.

This pattern is repeated for all responses.

 

Selecting Variables

Downloading Results

 

Now that you understand what the results are saying you may want to download them for further analysis. To do this right click (mac users: click and hold) where it says "click here to download this table in .csv format" and save the link to your hard drive.

The file can be opened in any spreadsheet or database program. When you open the downloaded file it will contain the same data you were presented with on the website.

 

Interpreting Results

wnyhra.org is a service of the Western New York Public Health Alliance	Site created by Bob Watkins