Community Projects

The Data and Decision Sciences Lab is constantly working with local community partners on several data related projects that have a local and global impact.

According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, approximately 74,000 children lived under poverty in the state of Nebraska in 2014. The same study suggests that almost 44,000 of these children came from a single parent family. These statistics make it clear enough to see that socio economic status plays an important role in the well-being of children. The environment surrounding the families of these children has a huge impact on who they will become (their status) in the society. This project uses the Public Use Microdata Areas files from the American Community Survey to review the characteristics and socio-economic status of the children under the age of six within the state of Nebraska. The data allows finding the proportion of poverty level between children under the age of six from poor versus non-poor families. The logistic regression models fitted to the data further characterize the percentage of these children under poverty based on unmarried-parent families, married-parent families, or families with no biological parent present.