Creator:

tradingeconomics.com, a website with over two billion users and boasts that it’s sources are “official” and span 196 countries.

Sources:

this specific data set is compiled from the united states federal reserve

Reason:

 they have a pretty significant customer base to rule out financial pursuits as their main motive, but from the website itself the following excerpt is essentially their mission statement:

 “Trading Economics has solutions for individual customers and businesses across different services and industries. Beyond being a trustworthy data source for many applications, Trading Economics has been helping companies and individuals to understand and predict trends, to identify opportunities and to stay ahead of their competition.”

How its been used: from the words on the website:

“The Trading Economics Application Programming Interface (API) provides direct access to our data. It allows clients to download millions of rows of historical data, to query our real-time economic calendar and to subscribe to updates. Providing several request methods to query our databases, with samples available in different programming languages, it is the best way to export data in XML, CSV or JSON format. The API can be used to feed a custom developed application, a public website or just off-the-shelf software like Microsoft Excel. The API subscription pricing is adjusted accordingly to the features you use, to your volume of requests and to the distribution you make.”

Format:

 they use various tables, spreadsheets and visuals like graphs, they have it available to where you can download whatever data you want into the various formats they offer and are compatible with popular applications like excel. This specific data set was a collection of bar graphs showing the averages of the work hours.

There is only one aim with this data set, and it is average weekly hours worked in saint louis Missouri. The data is structured in a bar graph so it’s not easily applicable to computer analysis unless you copy the data into a spreadsheet or pay some subscription to export it. The only writing the website provided on the data was a brief explanation on what the data is, what it provided and where it came from, so it sounds like the data is clean and relatively direct from source. Unfortunately just below the data set I found a link that said “More Illinois indicators” which is troubling due to the fact that this isn’t a source from or about Illinois but rather Missouri, which really throws into question the legitimacy of the data in my eyes. Not to say the federal reserve would be inaccurate but rather the website itself, perhaps letting a few key data points slip through the cracks unintentionally or misconstruing/misunderstanding the data themselves and therefore passing that mistake onto us. I would use this data if I were an employer for a business within Missouri, finding the average hours of work for employees means finding the average hours of work the employees are willing to work, id use this data only if I were afraid of the consequences of over/underworking my employees.