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GENERATING PARTICIPANT SPECIFIC FIGURES USING SAS GRAPHIC PROCEDURES
Citation:
CROGHAN, C. W. AND M. K. MORGAN. GENERATING PARTICIPANT SPECIFIC FIGURES USING SAS GRAPHIC PROCEDURES. Presented at SouthEast SAS User Group, Atlanta, GA, October 08 - 10, 2006.
Impact/Purpose:
The overall goal of this research program is to identify those chemicals, pathways, and activities that represent the highest potential exposures to children and to determine the factors that influence these exposures. The following objectives will address this goal:
Revise and refine the existing research plan for children's exposure measurements research.
Collect measurement data on children's exposures.
Provide analytical support to children's pesticide exposure research.
Develop analytical methods for pesticides in duplicate diet food samples.
Develop and apply analytical methods for other chemicals including but not limited to brominated diphenyl ethers, phthalates, perfluorinated chemicals.
Evaluate the impact of chiral chemistry on the risk to children and exposure assessment.
Provide support to the National Children's Study.
Perform data analyses to fill critical data gaps.
Conduct analyses of dietary samples and refine the dietary model for the dietary exposure algorithm.
Description:
An important part of our research at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is to effectively communicate the results from observational studies to the study participants. This can be particularly challenging where participants are from different socio-economic backgrounds. For our present study, we developed a short, descriptive report that was easy to understand by over 250 participants from low-, middle-, and high-income backgrounds. In each report, we present the chemical concentrations that were found at the participant's home compared to all homes in the study. The most effective way we found was to present the participant's study results using colorized figures. We will discuss the complex process that involved using SAS procedures gmap and greplay, and macro coding, to develop the figures for the reports. By creating an automated process, this program was an excellent solution that was creative, time efficient, and less prone to human error than the historical method of manually generating the plots.
In this paper, we will discuss the different SAS programming components (i.e., data step, SAS graph, and macro programming) that were utilized to construct the requested figures. Some knowledge of SAS programming is assumed. We will point out various efficiency elements that were incorporated within the programming. This paper is not intended to be a complete tutorial on the SAS graphics module. Only elements that were specifically used in generating the figures will be discussed. These elements include proc gmap, proc gslide, and proc greplay.