In 2015, The 17 United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals were adopted. ‘spiR’ is a wrapper of several open datasets published by the Social Progress Imperative (https://www.socialprogress.org/), including the Social Progress Index (a synthetic measure of human development across the world). ‘spiR’‘s goal is to provide data to help policymakers and researchers prioritize actions that accelerate social progress across the world in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals. The Social Progress Index proposes a new perspective on social challenges and needed efforts to accelerate social progress in line with the Sustainable Development Goals. In this context, the goal of ’spiR’ is to allow an easy connection with R to the Social Progress Index in order to benefit from the “power of crowds.” ‘spiR’ is an R wrapper to easily access the Social Progress Index datasets.
At the Social Progress Imperative, they define “social progress as the capacity of a society to meet the basic human needs of its citizens, establish the building blocks that allow citizens and communities to enhance and sustain the quality of their lives, and create the conditions for all individuals to reach their full potential. Improving quality of life is a complex task and past efforts to measure progress simply haven’t created a sufficiently nuanced picture of what a successful society looks like. That’s why we created the Social Progress Index. Rather than emphasizing traditional measurements of success like income and investment, we measure 51 social and environmental indicators to create a clearer picture of what life is really like for everyday people. The index doesn’t measure people’s happiness or life satisfaction, focusing instead on actual life outcomes in areas from shelter and nutrition to rights and education. This exclusive focus on measurable outcomes makes the index a useful policy tool that tracks changes in society over time.”
The index measures the quality of life for 98% of the world’s population. In its current version, the R client provides access to global data. In further versions, this R client will include different geographical levels: states, regions, cities and sometimes communities.
Three overarching dimensions are (1) Basic Human Needs, (2) Foundations of Wellbeing, and (3) Opportunity. Within each dimension, there are four components that further divide the indicators into thematic categories. The index consists in 51 social and environmental variables, covering the years 2014 to 2019.
To see a definition of the indicators, please visit this page. See below to have access through ‘spiR’ to the whole list of indicators.
Users can recreate in R impactful dashboards and visualizations as the ones found on www.socialprogress.org: click here
You can install the current development version of ‘spiR’ with:
A user needs to enter the ISO code of a country. To have access to this code, the following function provides this information.
sqs_spi_country() # A list of all countries will be produced
sqs_spi_country(country = "Canada") # The ISO code for Canada will be produced
sqs_spi_country("Canada") # The ISO code for Canada will be producedA user needs to enter the code of the desired indicator. To do so, the following function provides access to all the indicators of interest.
sqs_spi_indicator() # A list of all countries will be produced
sqs_spi_indicator(indicators = "mortality") # A list with all the variables including "mortlity" will be produced
sqs_spi_indicator("mortality") # A list with all the variables including "mortlity" will be producedOnce the user knows the ISO code and the indicator’s code, s.he can collect the data in a very easy way through this function:
sqs_spi_data(country = c("USA", "FRA"), year = c("2018", "2019"), indicators = "SPI") # It generates a data frame of the overall SPI indicator for the USA and France for the years 2018 and 2019
sqs_spi_data(country = c("USA", "FRA"), years = "2018", ) # It generates a data frame of all the indicators for the USA and France for the year 2018
sqs_spi_data("USA", "2019", c("SPI", "FOW")) # It generates a data frame of the SPI and FOW indicators for the USA in 2019
sqs_spi_data(, "2018", ) # It generates a data frame for all the countries and all the indicators for 2018
sqs_spi_data("USA", "2017", ) # It generates a data frame of all the indicators for the USA in 2017
sqs_spi_data("USA", , ) # It generates a data frame of all the indicators for all the years for the USA
sqs_spi_data(, , ) # It generates a data frame of the complete dataset
sqs_spi_data() # It generates a data frame of the complete datasetTo cite the ‘spiR’ package in your work:
Warin, T. (2019). “spiR: Client for the Social Progress Index. v0.1.0.”
@article{Warin2019,
author = "Thierry Warin",
title = "{spiR: An R Package for the Social Progress Index}",
year = "2019",
month = "12",
url = "https://figshare.com/articles/spiR_Client_for_Social_Progress_Index_Data/11421573",
doi = "10.6084/m9.figshare.11421573.v2"
}SQS stands for SKEMA Quantum Studio, a research and technological development centre based in Montreal, Canada, that serves as the engine room for the SKEMA Global lab in AI.
SKEMA Quantum Studio is also a state-of-the-art platform developed by our team that enables scholars, students and professors to access one of the most powerful analytical tools in higher education. By using data science and artificial intelligence within the platform, new theories, methods and concepts are being developed to study globalisation, innovation and digital transformations that our society faces.
To learn more about the SKEMA Quantum Studio and the mission of the SKEMA Global Lab in AI, please visit the following websites : SQS ; Global Lab.
The author would like to thank the Center for Interuniversity Research and Analysis of Organizations (CIRANO, Montreal) for its support, as well as Thibault Senegas, Marine Leroi and Martin Paquette at SKEMA Global Lab in AI. The usual caveats apply.