Data/information collated/prepared by Amit@caribbeansignal.com.
There were at least 42 murders in Barbados last year. Under normal circumstances, I publish murder stats on a monthly basis (I have data going back to 2017). However, COVID-19 analysis kept me busy for most of last year, and I quickly lost track of 2020 murders. This post remedies that and looks at all of 2020 in one article.
My data analysis consisted of five steps:
- Defining the question (or problem in this case) – The lack of detailed publicly available information on violent crime – murders in particular – in Barbados. This step also incudes identifying data sources.
- Collecting the data – This is probably the least exciting part of data analysis. For the murder statistics related to Barbados, this usually involves me monitoring the news (The Nation, Barbados Today, Loop Barbados, et cetera) for reports of murders. Observations are then entered into an Excel sheet under several headings (Name, Age, Address, Parish, et cetera). For 2020, I contracted out this step.
- Cleaning the data – This involved removing errors as well as unwanted data, filling in missing data, and bringing structure to the data (i.e., new or modifications to existing columns, typos, formatting, et cetera). This is where I also decided which records to count as part of the data analysis and which to disregard. This step is probably the most time consuming.
Read more HERE.
