Measles Immunization Rates in U.S. Schools, 2017-2019

46,412 schools across 32 U.S. states reported measles vaccination rates, primarily for the 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 school years. The data was originally compiled by The Wall Street Journal and subsequently wrangled by the TidyTuesday community. It is provided as a practice dataset and may require additional cleaning.

Use Cases

• Analyze state-level disparities in measles immunization rates based on the listed states.
• Identify potential clusters of low vaccination coverage across U.S. schools.
• Practice data cleaning and wrangling techniques on a real-world public health dataset.
• Compare vaccination rates between the 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 school years for overlapping states.

Strengths

• Covers 46,412 schools, providing a substantial sample size.
• Includes data from 32 states, offering broad geographic coverage.
• Explicitly lists 11 states with data for the 2017-2018 school year.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count for individual states is unknown, which may limit granular analysis.
• Data may reflect geographic bias inherent to the original compilation by The Wall Street Journal.

Provenance

Source

The Wall Street Journal

Collection Method

Compiled and published by The Wall Street Journal, then downloaded and wrangled by the TidyTuesday community.

Time Range

Primarily the 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 school years.

Geography

32 U.S. states, including Colorado, Connecticut, Minnesota, Montana, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Utah, and Washington.