The Public Interest Data Lab is intended to provide data science experience to students in service of the public interest. We have three goals:
- Make progress on a project that advances the public interest or social good, in service of a client's goals. And have a project to point to at the end, an example of your work.
- Practice working with real data to answer real questions. This includes finding data, exploring and cleaning data, analyzing and modeling data, and visualizing and communicating results.
- Develop experience working on a data science team, including processes for working collaboratively, openly, inclusively, and reproducibly.
Our client for this spring is the City of Charlottesville's Department of Social Services who wish to understand whether there is racial disproportionality or racially disparate outcomes in the local foster care system, and if so, to what extent and at what stages. There are a number of ways we might investigate this question, depending on the nature of the data the DSS records as well as other data we might use to supplement, merge with, or contextualize the data.