Running Head: GENDER AND ER VISITSG 1

Final Analysis Project:

Correlation Between Gender and ER Visits

Eduardo Santoyo

COH 602

National University

January 6, 2016
GENDER AND ER VISITS 2

Correlation Between Gender and Visits to Emergency Room

The question being addressed in this analysis, Is there a relationship between gender and

number of visits to the Emergency Room? To assess this relationship properly, one would need

to look at other possible variables that would have an effect on the correlation between the

primary variables. One must look at how all of these variables and how they would lead to

conclude whether a correlation presents itself, and if so, is there statistically significant evidence

to prove these correlations exist? One of the other factors that were taken into consideration was

the age of the cohort in 1971.

This project used the data set, COH602, which is a subset of the variables from the Kaiser

Permanente Study of the Oldest Old Survey in the SAS Web Editor program.

First, a PROC CONTENTS was conducted with the SAS Web Editor to determine what

variables would be available for this project to analyze. Here are some of the variables that were

available to analyze.

Variable Name Label

AGEIN71 1971 age, cohort1

AGEIN80 1980 age, cohort2

COHORT Cohort

RACE SUM*race

SEX SUM*sex

VISSUM1 # sum*ER visit

NHOME Lives in nursing home

GENDER AND ER VISITS 3

The 2011-2012 Data Dictionary (Regents of University of California, 2013) provides the

following information regarding the variables:

Cohort 1 ages at 1971 ranged from 65 to 95 years

Cohort 2 ages at 1980 ranged from 65 to 94 years
Cohort meant the group of population that was measured together and followed for

designated period of time

Race was coded as 1=Black, 2 =White, 3 = Asian, 4 = Hispanic, 5 = Other, and

6 = Unspecified
Sex was gender which was coded as 0 = Female and 1 = Male
The number of visits to the ER ranged from 0 to 53 visits occurring between a designated

period of time
Living in a nursing home was coded as 0 = No and 1 = Yes.

Frequency

We first computed the frequency distributions for the following variables (AGEIN71, SEX,

and VISSUM1) using a PROC FREQ procedure in SAS. The SEX variable was divided into

either Female (0) or Male (1). The AGEIN71 variable had a range of values that started at 65

years to 95 years of age. The VISSUM1 described the number of visits to the emergency room

that occurred, which ranged from 0 to 53 visits within a period of time.

Table 1
Sample Demographics
(N = 6000)

Age
AGEIN Cumulative Cumulative
71 Frequency Percent Frequency Percent

65 132 4.59 132 4.59

66 135 4.69 267 9.28

67 117 4.07 384 13.35

68 126 4.38 510 17.73

GENDER AND ER VISITS 4

69 103 3.58 613 21.31

70 92 3.20 705 24.50

71 71 2.47 776 26.97

72 83 2.88 859 29.86

73 73 2.54 932 32.39

74 61 2.12 993 34.52

75 270 9.38 1263 43.90

76 241 8.38 1504 52.28

77 168 5.84 1672 58.12

78 168 5.84 1840 63.96

79 132 4.59 1972 68.54

80 243 8.45 2215 76.99

81 197 6.85 2412 83.84

82 129 4.48 2541 88.32

83 96 3.34 2637 91.66

84 86 2.99 2723 94.65

85 50 1.74 2773 96.39

86 35 1.22 2808 97.60

87 27 0.94 2835 98.54

88 17 0.59 2852 99.13

89 5 0.17 2857 99.30

90 7 0.24 2864 99.55

91 4 0.14 2868 99.69

92 4 0.14 2872 99.83

94 3 0.10 2875 99.93

95 2 0.07 2877 100.00

VisitstoER

VISSU Frequency Percent Cumulative Cumulative

GENDER AND ER VISITS 5

M1 Frequency Percent

0 1502 26.89 1502 26.89

1 1109 19.85 2611 46.74

2 838 15.00 3449 61.74

3 566 10.13 4015 71.88

4 425 7.61 4440 79.48

5 296 5.30 4736 84.78

6 190 3.40 4926 88.18

7 166 2.97 5092 91.16

8 115 2.06 5207 93.22

9 78 1.40 5285 94.61

10 68 1.22 5353 95.83

11 45 0.81 5398 96.63

12 45 0.81 5443 97.44

13 28 0.50 5471 97.94

14 28 0.50 5499 98.44

15 15 0.27 5514 98.71

16 8 0.14 5522 98.85

17 10 0.18 5532 99.03

18 8 0.14 5540 99.18

19 7 0.13 5547 99.30

20 3 0.05 5550 99.36

21 4 0.07 5554 99.43

22 2 0.04 5556 99.46

23 5 0.09 5561 99.55

24 4 0.07 5565 99.62

25 1 0.02 5566 99.64

26 3 0.05 5569 99.70

27 1 0.02 5570 99.71

28 4 0.07 5574 99.79

GENDER AND ER VISITS 6

29 1 0.02 5575 99.80

30 1 0.02 5576 99.82

31 1 0.02 5577 99.84

33 1 0.02 5578 99.86

34 2 0.04 5580 99.89

35 1 0.02 5581 99.91

37 1 0.02 5582 99.93

39 1 0.02 5583 99.95

42 1 0.02 5584 99.96

52 1 0.02 5585 99.98

53 1 0.02 5586 100.00

Gender
Cumulative Cumulative
SEX Frequency Percent Frequency Percent

0 3006 50.18 3006 50.18

1 2984 49.82 5990 100.00

Statistics

For this inferential data analysis, I have chosen to run a PROC CORR DATA procedure

to see if there is a correlation between the three variables (age of the cohort in 1971, visits to the

ER, and sex). According to Sullivan (2012), in correlation analysis, we quantify the association

between two continuous variables. The strength of the correlation coefficient is an indicator of

the strength of association between the variables. For this analysis, we conducted procedures

between: age of gender vs. number of ER visits, age vs. gender, and age vs. number of ER visits.

We wanted to see if there was any statically significant correlation between two of the variables.

Table 2
GENDER AND ER VISITS 7

Correlations

Variables: Age of Cohort vs. Gender:

2 Variables: AGEIN71 SEX

Simple Statistics

Variabl Std Minim

e N Mean Dev Sum um Maximum

AGEIN 28 75.734 6.020 2178 65.000 95.00000

71 77 79 27 89 00

SEX 59 0.4981 0.500 2984 0 1.00000

90 6 04

Pearson Correlation Coefficients

Prob > |r| under H0: Rho=0
Number of Observations

AGEIN71 SEX

AGEIN71 1.00000 0.01803

0.3336
2877 2877

SEX 0.01803 1.00000

0.3336
2877 5990

Variables: Age of Cohort vs. Visits to ER

2 Variables: AGEIN71 VISSUM1

Simple Statistics

Variabl Std Minim

e N Mean Dev Sum um Maximum

AGEIN 28 75.734 6.020 2178 65.000 95.00000

71 77 79 27 89 00

VISSU 55 2.8549 3.835 1594 0 53.00000

M1 86 9 16 8

Pearson Correlation Coefficients

Prob > |r| under H0: Rho=0
Number of Observations

AGEIN71 VISSUM1

AGEIN71 1.00000 0.05873

GENDER AND ER VISITS 8

0.0027
2877 2601

VISSUM1 0.05873 1.00000

0.0027
2601 5586

Variables: Visits to ER vs. Gender

2 Variables: VISSUM1 SEX

Simple Statistics

Variabl Std Su Minimu

e N Mean Dev m m Maximum

VISSU 55 2.854 3.835 159 0 53.00000

M1 86 99 16 48

SEX 59 0.498 0.500 298 0 1.00000

90 16 04 4

Pearson Correlation Coefficients

Prob > |r| under H0: Rho=0
Number of Observations

VISSUM1 SEX

VISSUM1 1.00000 0.02226

0.0962
5586 5586

SEX 0.02226 1.00000

0.0962
5586 5990

Discussion

With the descriptive statistics shown in Table 1, we can see that a majority of the cohort

in 1971 were 75 years old with a frequency of 270, or 9.38%. For the number of visits to the

emergency room, the largest number were those who had no visits to the emergency room with a

frequency of 1502, or 26.9%. Looking at the sample population and gender was divided; we

have females with a frequency of 3006, or 50.18%, and males with a frequency of 2784, or

49.82%. Observing the division of gender, it is closely divided up equally in our sample
GENDER AND ER VISITS 9

population.

In working with correlations between variables, it must range between -1 and +1 and

quantifies the direction and strength of the linear association between the two variables

(Sullivan, 2012). A value such as 0.9 suggests a strong, positive correlation and a value of -0.2

would lead us to believe there is a weak, negative correlation. When a correlation is presented

as being closer to zero, it suggests that there is no linear association between two continuous

variables. The results show that there is no linear association between the two variables of age of

cohort in 1971 and visits to the emergency room. The value of 0.058 helps to support this

analysis. There is no linear association between the variables of sex and visits to the emergency

room with a value of 0.022. There was also no correlated association between age of the cohort

in 1971 and sex. This correlation had a value of 0.018. With all three correlational relationships

being so close to zero, there seemed to be no strong linear correlation. So we can conclude that

there is no statistically significant correlation between gender and the number of visits to the

emergency room.

SAS Code

The following the code used in SAS to provide the results for the project analysis:

LIBNAME mydata "/courses/d6867a15ba27fe300" access=readonly;

PROC CONTENTS DATA=mydata.old;
RUN;
PROC FREQ DATA=mydata.old;
TABLE agein71;
TABLE VISSUM1;
TABLE SEX;
RUN;
PROC FREQ DATA=mydata.old;
TABLES SEX*vissum1;
RUN;
PROC CORR DATA=mydata.old;
VAR agein71 SEX;
GENDER AND ER VISITS 10

RUN;
PROC CORR DATA=mydata.old;
VAR agein71 vissum1;
RUN;
PROC CORR DATA=mydata.old;
VAR vissum1 SEX;
RUN;

References

Regents of University of California. (2013) California Health Interview Survey Data Dictionary.

Retrived from http://healthpolicy.ucla.edu/chis/data/public-use-data-

file/Documents/CHIS_2011-2012_Data_Dictionary_PUF-ADULT.pdf

Sullivan, L. M. (2012) Essentials of biostatistics in public health. Sudbury, Massachusetts: Jones

& Barlett Learning.