Preliminary Review of the Titanic Dataset
The 2012 dataset of the R.M.S. Titanic from Kaggle provides a social cross-section of the passengers aboard the Titanic and those that had perished with her. Many questions can now be asked with this published dataset, some of which I’d like to explore myself.
The oldest passenger aboard the Titanic was Mr. Algernon Henry Wilson Barkworth — whose mere name just sounds upper class. In an emergency situation where crew members are having to decide which passengers to save, it is expected that the elderly are not the priority. As morbid as that sounds (and I don’t proclaim that as my own opinion), it would stand to reason that some members of the crew would have felt uneasy turning away women and children in favor of an eighty-year-old man with the last name of Barkworth.
But that wasn’t the case.
Mr. Barkworth was among the survivors of the Titanic sinking while many others perished. Why did the crew prioritize or, at the very least, sanction his survival but send others to their demise? The historical significance of this question would look towards the societal balancing of age and survivability, but also (age + wealthy) and survivability. Most people today would espouse the view that the elderly are not priority in an emergency situation where the crew must only save specific individuals, but maybe the society of the past had a different view?
Barkworth also stepped onto the voyage alone, reportedly bringing no family members.1 Just from a precursory glance of the dataset, it appears more often that wealthier passengers took this journey alone as opposed to, say, third-class passengers that came with family: likely to immigrate to the United States. Could the survival of first-class and lower-class passengers be affected because of this fact? When a first-class passenger had immediate family with them, were they less likely to survive so as to avoid separating the family?
The British inquiry into the sinking of the Titanic attributed lower survival rates among the lower class of passengers as simply immigrants being “reluctant to leave their belongings, and that their lack of English prevented them from following the crew’s instruction.”2 As gross as this explanation sounds, it is still a claim that must be confronted with evidence and examination of the dataset. For this, I believe looking at a correlation between the number of family members and survivability may provide an alternate picture: the lower class generally brought their family alone and so saving them proved to be more difficult.
Again, this all depends on what the data says.