I’ve recently been scouring the internet for a public opinion data set pertaining to job satisfaction. I was particularly interested in examining how gender, age, and socio-economic status influence how satisfied an individual is with their current employment situation. For example, existing research suggests that women and private-sector employees tend to have higher levels of job satisfaction. While I did not find an satisfactory data set on job satisfaction, I did find some intriguing information on regional variation in job satisfaction in England. I will admit that I know very little about England and can not propose any plausible explanations for this variation. In any case, I’ve generated a Cleveland Dotplot using GGPlot2 and have included the image and my R code below. It would be intriguing to map this data onto a spatial map of England and I plan to work on that soon.

df = data.frame(Region=c("Southwest","West Midlands","Southeast",
        "Yorkshire","East Midlands","East England","London",
        "Northwest","Northeast"), Satisfaction=c(49,45,41,40,39,37,33,30,22),
        Num=c(1:9))

Region = df[,1]
Satisfaction = df[,2]
Num = df[,3]

ggplot(df, aes(x=Satisfaction, y=reorder(Region,Num))) +
      geom_point(colour="red", size=2.5) + opts(title="Job Satisfaction in England") +
      ylab("Region") + xlim(10,70) +
      opts(plot.title = theme_text(face = "bold", size=12)) +
      xlab("") + ylab("") +
      opts(axis.text.y = theme_text(family = "sans",
                  face = "bold", size = 8))+
      opts(axis.text.x = theme_text(family = "sans",
                  face = "bold", size = 8))