Evaluating England's Teenage Pregnancy Strategy
Authors: Andrew J Baxter
Working with Shiny for 1+ years
Abstract: I built this app to conduct the Interrupted Time Series analyses for my PhD project. England launched its Teenage Pregnancy Strategy in 1999 with the goal of halving pregnancies in ten years. ITS analyses can examine effects of an intervention by accounting for pre-existing trends. You can repeat my analyses in this app by adding comparators and adjusting variables to text reliability. I intend to use it to show my workings in my publications and for public engagement to share my findings.
Full Description: If you have to copy and paste a lot, it's time to write a function. If you have to change a lot of variables each time, it's time to build a shiny app!
Doing my analyse for my PhD project in R was what drove me to build an app for this purpose. I was examining pregnancy rates around the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy launch in England to see what the effects were. I constructed it using all of the potential inputs for various comparative analyses on the left, outputting all the model information and graphs I need to report my findings in my thesis and in papers.
An Interrupted Time Series analysis examines the trend before an intervention and compares with the trend after, to see if a change has taken place which might have been caused by the action. In the simple ITS comparison on loading you can see a significant effect straight away!
Adding controls to an ITS analysis can account for underlying trends, common shocks and other unrelated policy/environmental changes. What happens then when we add unexposed Scotland or Wales to the analysis? Have a go and find out!
Data for this app is taken from publicly available sources - The Office for National Statistics and Information Services Division Scotland. You can read more about my project at andybaxter.me/myPhD.
Category: Research
Keywords: Policy Evaluation, Public Health, Natural Experiments
Shiny app: andybaxter.shinyapps.io/teen_preg_uk_its/
Repo: GitHub - andrewbaxter439/ITS_shinyapp
RStudio Cloud: Posit Cloud
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