Smoking and Mental Health in NCT

This dashboard provides a county-level snapshot for 24 North Central Texas counties across 2015–2024, letting users compare counties by a selected health indicator and year.

How to read it

  • Metric (Select): switches the entire dashboard between:
    • Adult Smoking (percentage)
    • Poor mental health days (days in the last 30)
    • Mental health providers (rate; often stored as a decimal—see note below)
  • Year filter: updates the map, ranking, and distribution to the selected year.
  • Map: shows county patterns spatially; clicking a county can be used to filter/highlight the other charts.
  • Trend: shows how values change over time (use it for direction—up/down—rather than labeling every line).
  • County Ranking: ranks counties for the selected year from highest to lowest.
  • Distribution: groups counties into value ranges so you can see whether most counties cluster around a “typical” level or if values are spread out.

Units / proportions (important)

  • Adult Smoking is a percent (e.g., 18.6% means 18.6 out of 100 adults).
  • Poor mental health days is days (e.g., 5.0 means ~5 poor mental health days in the past 30 days on average).
  • Mental health providers is typically a rate, not a percent by definition. If your field is formatted as a percent and shows values like 7.5%, that’s Tableau formatting the decimal (0.075) as a percent. Use a clear label like “Provider rate (decimal)” or convert it to a standard rate (e.g., per 100,000) if you want it to be easily interpretable.