heights {brolgar}

World Height Data

Description

Average male heights in 144 countries from 1810-1989, with a smaller number of countries from 1500-1800. Data has been filtered to only include countries with more than one observation.

Usage

heights

Format

An object of class tbl_ts (inherits from tbl_df, tbl, data.frame) with 1490 rows and 4 columns.

Details

heights is stored as a time series tsibble object. It contains the variables:

• country: The Country. This forms the identifying key.

• year: Year. This forms the time index.

• height_cm: Average male height in centimeters.

• continent: continent extracted from country name using countrycode package (https://joss.theoj.org/papers/10.21105/joss.00848).

For more information, see the article: "Why are you tall while others are short? Agricultural production and other proximate determinants of global heights", Joerg Baten and Matthias Blum, European Review of Economic History 18 (2014), 144–165. Data available from https://datasets.iisg.amsterdam/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=hdl:10622/IAEKLA, accessed via the Clio Infra website.

Examples

# show the data
heights

# show the spaghetti plot (ugh!)
library(ggplot2)
ggplot(heights, 
       aes(x = year, 
           y = height_cm, 
           group = country)) + 
    geom_line()
    
# Explore all samples with `facet_strata()`
ggplot(heights,
       aes(x = year,
           y = height_cm,
           group = country)) +
  geom_line() +
  facet_strata()

# Explore the heights over each continent
ggplot(heights,
       aes(x = year,
           y = height_cm,
           group = country)) +
  geom_line() +
  facet_wrap(~continent)
  
# explore the five number summary of height_cm with `features`
heights %>% 
  features(height_cm, feat_five_num)