Section 1 - searching for an area of interest and locating data

I started this project by exploring various areas of possible interest. These
were universities, employment and vehicle costs especially that of car insurance. Although my initial areas of interest were quite varied. (For a diagram of my brainstorming click here)

I found that I had to limit my search for information to something that was
more manageable.
My search for data soon led me to concentrate on the issue of car insurance.

The first question that I raised was whether car insurance rates were affected
by alcohol use. Although one company discounted the cost for abstaining
from alcohol I did not notice any substantial difference so I dropped this
avenue but for interest I sought out data on alcohol related accidents and
found the internet source

http://www.nh-dwi.com/caip-206.htm

from the Community Alcohol Information Program (CAIP), a private,
non-profit agency founded in 1977 to provide alcohol education, assessment,
and evaluation services to persons convicted of alcohol related offenses in
New Hampshire. These statistics are complied by the U. S. Dept. of
Transportation and the N. H. Department of Safety. Since I found no data
on Canada, I did not pursue it further. I did not follow up any further on
the issue of alcohol and driving.

I decided to search for data on car insurance costs and found that quotes
could be obtained from

www.kanetix.com

which allowed me to compare costs for different insurance companies.
Once the questionnaire was filled out, the only variable that I changed
was age so that I could get a fair comparison without changing other
variables. As I suspect the insurance costs varied with age and gender.
So I decided to follow this up by looking for information on Canadian
age and gender data from ESTAT available from Statistics Canada.

The data that was collected from ESTAT was accessed in the following way:

1. Go to http://estat.statcan.ca/ and choose ENGLISH.
2. Accept the terms of the preceding Licence Agreement.
3. From the Table of Contents choose Eduction, Data, and Students.
4. Search for the following table numbers to locate the information
regarding the possible research topics.

110-0002
110-0029

I also searched for data which would give me information on accident
rates and age of the driver. I did find some data on the Fathom CD
itself which I obtained as follows:

1. Choose Open from the File menu.
2. Open the Sample Documents folder, then the Learning Guide Starters,
and then Accidents.

For information on what the document should look like, click here.

Although this was a start I did not have any information on Ontario. It is
only much later into the project that I located data that I would have
liked to have had from the beginning! In the Ontario Ministry of Transport
web site

http://www.mto.gov.on.ca/english/

I did a search on "driver licenses by age", from which I found a number
of Ontario Road Safety Reports and I selected one of the more recent
ones for the year 2000 under the heading "Ontario Road Safety Annual
Report 2000 - PDF", with web address

http://www.mto.gov.on.ca:80/english/safety/orsar/orsar00/ors_00.pdf

With these various sets of data I was ready to start narrowing down my
questions and exploring what the data I had found could point to.

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