Week 6 Tutorial

Learning Objectives

In this tutorial, you will be combining data from the Australia election and the Australian census.

You will be learning how to:
  • Integrate data from different source to make exploratory inferences
  • Compare summary statistics by region using different geographical statistics
  • We will use the 2016 census data (you will use 2021 data on your assignment)

Before your tutorial

1. Get the geographical boundaries for 2016 census regions.

Go to https://www.abs.gov.au/census/find-census-data/geopackages select the following options:

  • 2016
  • Victoria
  • Employment, Income and Unpaid Work (EIUW).
  • EIUW GeoPackage A.

2. You will also need the data for the 2018 electoral boundaries.

You have a copy of the 2022 boundaries from Tutorial 5, but for today download the 2018 boundaries from here.

These are closer to the 2016 year of the census.

Exercise 1

Read in the data from different sources

  1. Import the 2016 GeoPackage data with SA1 regions.
  1. Calculate the centroids for each SA1 region.
  1. Read in the data containing the electoral boundaries.

Exercise 2

Integrate in the data from different sources

  1. Plot the median weekly personal income data on top of the electoral boundaries like below. Can you find which regions have wealthy individuals?

  1. Estimate a median weekly personal income for the Melbourne district.

For discussion

Think about your results

  • Looking at the map above, there is one electorate won by the Green party. Notice, this is where a lot of wealthy individuals live.

  • Can you say that those who vote for the Green party are rich individuals? Why or why not? Discuss with your classmates.

  • Why do some geographical regions look sparse in terms of the census reported median weekly personal income?

  • What is ecological fallacy? How does it relate to your conclusions from before?

Exercise 3: In your own time

Compare with different a layer

Repeat Exercise 2 using the SED regions. How does the estimate of median weekly personal income for the Melbourne district differ? What about estimates in other districts?

Important

Reminder the SED regions are NOT the same as the commonwealth electoral boundaries!!! And CED regions are not exactly the same as the federal electoral boundaries either!!!