Project Team
Students
Matthew Rice
Economics
Harrisburg
Faculty Mentors
Dr. Rukayya Ibrahim
Harrisburg
Science, Engineering, and Technology
Project
https://sites.psu.edu/mcreu/files/formidable/2/2024-07-23/mcreu_poster_FINAL.pdf
Project Video
Project Abstract
Despite the massive victories of the Civil Rights Movement, Black Americans have disproportionately worse health outcomes than their white peers. We aim to explore differences in impact that COVID-19 has had on both predominantly Black and predominantly white communities in South Central Pennsylvania. To do this, we determine Google search terms that may be correlated with COVID-19 and obtain the data from Google Trends. We use an ARIMAX model to determine the significance of the terms in each South Central Pennsylvania county and run BSTS models with and without the exogenous variables to compare the cumulative absolute error in each model.
Search terms such as “credit card” and “unemployment” are very significant in the Dauphin County and Lancaster County, the two counties with the highest levels of people of color. There are also less statistically significant terms in Adams County and Perry County, the two counties with the lowest levels of people of color. For Dauphin County and Perry County, the BSTS models with and without exogenous variables have the same amount of error. These findings display that although our BSTS model does not exhibit differences after including the search terms, areas with higher levels of people of color have a higher level of correlation to the search terms.
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