Data on health care utilization was collected for 6 years from
1985 to 1990, by St. John's General Hospital. The data was collected from 48
families. The first 36 families have four members each and the last 12
families have 3 members each. Therefore, 180 individuals were observed for 6
years. Gender, education level, number of chronic conditions and age were
noted at the beginning of the study. The response variables are the
number of visits paid to the physician each year. The data file can
be accessed through our course webpage :
http://www.math.mun.ca/~sneddon/st6590
If you plan on using Splus to do your data analysis, you can access the data by typing:
attach("/users/math/faculty/sneddon/DATA")
The data is in contained in hosp.dat
You have been contacted by the hospital board to give them statistical insight into how to understand the effects of the various characteristics on the number of visits to the physician, both per year and in total over the 6 years.
Datafile description
The datafile contains the following columns, in order from left to right: