The Chicago Hardship Index: An Introduction to Urban Inequity

Abstract

The Chicago Hardship Index is a proposed starting point for introducing students to structural urban inequities. ASA’s mission statement to use statistics to enhance human welfare serves as a motivation for social justice projects. This article contains an application of ASA’s ethical guidelines to such projects, background information about the history and landscape of Chicago community areas, and practical ideas for how to combine hardship index data with learning statistical and data science tools. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

Keywords

• asa mission statement and ethical guidelines
• 77 chicago community areas
• data visualization and assessment
• economic hardship indicators
• homicide counts
• intro to stats r-lab
• k-means clustering
• urban social justice