state is never the right level of data to look at except for laws
County-level obesity datasets are mostly based on educated guesses that vary widely rather than actual measurements. I have found several of those datasets that correlate very poorly with one another. Variables such as median household income often correlate more strongly with obesity in some of those datasets than different obesity estimates correlate with each other.
AFAICT, state-level obesity estimates are way more reliable. The estimates generated with BRFSS data seem to be based on large sample sizes in each state, which is something that we do not have for each individual county. So I think it makes sense to look at obesity at the state level.
That’s only true if people within states are more similar to each other on the relevant axes than to people in other states, right? If the real divide is rural/urban or education, then comparing states isn’t very useful even if some states are more rural or educated than others.
The fact that the county-level data is bad is unfortunate and makes the county-level analysis less useful, but doesn’t fix any of the problems with state-level data.
County-level obesity datasets are mostly based on educated guesses that vary widely rather than actual measurements. I have found several of those datasets that correlate very poorly with one another. Variables such as median household income often correlate more strongly with obesity in some of those datasets than different obesity estimates correlate with each other.
See this Google Colab notebook for a few comparisons.
AFAICT, state-level obesity estimates are way more reliable. The estimates generated with BRFSS data seem to be based on large sample sizes in each state, which is something that we do not have for each individual county. So I think it makes sense to look at obesity at the state level.
That’s only true if people within states are more similar to each other on the relevant axes than to people in other states, right? If the real divide is rural/urban or education, then comparing states isn’t very useful even if some states are more rural or educated than others.
The fact that the county-level data is bad is unfortunate and makes the county-level analysis less useful, but doesn’t fix any of the problems with state-level data.