The Durham County Social Determinants of Health (DCSDH) dataset is a large, address-level contextual database that merges multiple publicly available demographic, employment, tax, housing, and health metrics from Durham County into a single database.
As part of the Durham Population Lab (DPL) initiative, the Duke Population Research Center (DPRC) has created this data set to provide spatially granular data on socio-economic conditions at the county and neighborhood level which can be related to many questions relevant to population science, including fertility, mortality, education and the social determinants of health.
DPRC provides resources to the entire Duke Population Research Institute (DUPRI) community of scholars to explore and access the DCSDH database. A list of data sources utilized to build the DCSDH data set can be found here. We have created an online, searchable data dictionary that provides information about the variables in the data set. The data dictionary includes variable descriptions, data level of the variables, coverage by year, and missingness, and we also provide documentation for connecting to the ODBC/MySQL database that houses the DCSDH data.
Because of the large size of this data set (141,000 rows by 2,300 columns), DPRC has transformed the DCSDH data into a relational database that can be remotely accessed and queried. This database provides centralized access and allows researchers to download variables relevant to their interests.
To request access to the DCSDH database, DUPRI Scholars should contact Mark Yacoub.
The DCSDH database construction has been made possible through funding from NICHD P2C HD065563 grant.