Smooth Sailing with the Spielman Study
For this reproduction, we were interested to know if weighting the SoVI components by percent variance would improve internal consistency or theoretical consistency. We could accomplish this by comparing Figure 2, depicting direction reversals and summary stats, of the original study and of the reproduction, which were weighted by percent variance.
Something my group wrestled with while working on the Spielman study was using Folium to make an interactive map of the National SoVI scores. At first, we weere able to make a map using a plot function, but it took us a while longer to figure out Folium. What was interesting here was how we were able to achieve the the correct scale. In order to do this while making a plot map, we removed Alaska and Hawaii. However, we did not need to remove these two states in order with the interactive map, as one could easily move around using the mouse. In addition to adding maps of the National SoVI scores, we made other changes: we created an output table of factor loadings; we calculated the percent variance explained by each component of the National SoVI; and we reweighted the SoVI by the percentage variance explained of each component.
References
Cutter, S. L., Boruff, B. J., & Shirley, W. L. (2003). Social vulnerability to environmental hazards. Social Science Quarterly, 84(2), 242–261. https://doi.org/10.1111/1540-6237.8402002
Spielman, S. E., Tuccillo, J., Folch, D. C., Schweikert, A., Davies, R., Wood, N., & Tate, E. (2020). Evaluating social vulnerability indicators: criteria and their application to the Social Vulnerability Index. Natural Hazards, 100(1), 417–436. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-019-03820-z