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1 vote
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3 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment The maps on Census Reporter are retrieved directly from the US Census Bureau's TIGER map program. Note that the maps reflect the geographies for which the presented data was tabulated, not the maps which might be used if an election were held today. Around redistricting time, it is common for maps to appear "out of date" for a few years.
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2 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment Census Reporter publishes data for the American Community Survey, as received from the US Census Bureau. At this time, the American Community Survey does not ask direct questions about sexual orientation or gender identity (SOGI), although some other Census Bureau programs are experimenting with ways to collect this data.
See, for example:
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/sexual-orientation-and-gender-identity.htmlIn September, 2023, press reports discussed experiments in adding SOGI questions to the American Community Survey -- see, for example, https://www.npr.org/2023/09/24/1201383729/to-better-enforce-civil-rights-laws-the-census-bureau-wants-more-data-on-the-lgb
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1 vote
An error occurred while saving the comment At the time of this posting, we were in the process of updating Census Reporter to use the 2022 ACS 5-year release, the first to data tabulated using the redrawn state legislative districts boundaries.
As of now, the boundaries you were expecting should be those shown on the site.
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1 vote
An error occurred while saving the comment You may be able to use table B02015 Asian Alone by Selected Groups -- this doesn't get people who are multiracial (although it would include any Asian/Latino respondents since Latino identity is treated separately from race)
Here's that table for all counties in Illinois: https://censusreporter.org/data/table/?table=B02015&geo_ids=050|04000US17&primary_geo_id=04000US17 Note very high MOEs for some cases, which is common when a small population is divided into so many subgroups.
Korean is not included in the Ancestry tables, which I think is acknowledged here
https://www.census.gov/topics/population/ancestry/about/faq.html#par_textimage_2
"In most of our ancestry tables we do not show groups that are shown elsewhere in the race and Hispanic tables"hope this helps
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1 vote
An error occurred while saving the comment That work was research and design proposals. We have not moved forward on implementing historical data in Census Reporter. Separate from design questions, there are sizeable challenges in dealing with ongoing changes to both Census geographic definitions and the questions asked on the ACS.
We would need to secure a pretty sizeable chunk of funding to build something like this out, but it's something we are always thinking about and always interested in discussing with potential funders.
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1 vote
An error occurred while saving the comment Thanks for the idea. To be honest, the maps are one of the more challenging parts of Census Reporter. Finding something that works for almost 30,000 variables across over 1000 tables, for over 600,000 geographies without human intervention or tuning is pretty hard!
In general, we've tried to walk a line between providing some basic features, while also making it very easy for people to get the data and do whatever they need with it. Of course, tools and skills with GIS analysis are less common than data table analysis, but there are actually a lot of free tools and guides out there.
To that end, it's easy to download the data for any detailed table as a GIS file (ESRI Shapefile, GeoJSON, or KML). From there, we'd recommend tools like QGIS, if you want a more GUI experience, or something like GeoPandas for python. For R users, the tidycensus library actually provides both data retrieval and analysis tools, including GIS, eg https://walker-data.com/census-r/mapping-census-data-with-r.html
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4 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment We have created a knowledge base article with more information on this topic: https://censusreporter.uservoice.com/knowledgebase/articles/2001790-combining-estimates-for-multiple-geographies-or-fo
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6 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment Thanks for this suggestion. Note that the Census Bureau also recommends against comparing 1-year and 5-year releases which have the same end year, since the pool of data is different.
If you choose a data table which includes some geographies that are only in the 5-year, Census Reporter should use the 5-year estimates for all geographies, even those which may also be in the one year: for example, table B01003 for all places in Cuyahoga County: https://censusreporter.org/data/table/?table=B01003&geo_ids=160|05000US39035&primary_geo_id=05000US39035
Since this one already has 3 votes even though it was only opened yesterday, we'd be happy to hear more if folks disagree or just don't understand.
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1 vote
An error occurred while saving the comment This is a totally sensible suggestion, although adding any kind of configuration options is a substantial shift from the current model.
Also, the idea that there are two comparisons is fairly deeply baked in to the system, so if we took your reasonable suggestion about counties, we'd probably shift to only metro and state -- and that raises the issue that a fair number of counties aren't in any metro/micro area, so the system would then need to have a variable process for deciding the comparisons. Not an unreasonable thing to ask, but it makes re-plumbing everything a bit harder.
In any case, we welcome feedback from folks about how Census Reporter could be better, and we'll take these ideas into account.
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2 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment This one flew under our radar when it was originally posted. Unfortunately, data in Census Reporter is provided nearly exactly as it is published by the US Census Bureau in the American Community Survey. (The only exception is our profile pages, where in some cases we "roll up" ACS detailed tables into forms that we think are a bit more what people often want, such as the age brackets or racial categories.
That is, this isn't something we can really do anything about.
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1 vote
An error occurred while saving the comment Not sure what you're asking. If I, for example, go to a data table for "Maui County HI" and choose "divide into County Subdivisions", "West Molokai CCD, Maui County, HI" is included, at the far right (because the subdivisions are sorted alphabetically). Is it possible that you just didn't scroll to see it? This may be better taken up via our support/feedback process
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1 vote
An error occurred while saving the comment Questions like this are better suited to the "Contact support" option, but no worries, we'll answer as best we can here.
Census Reporter provides access to the most recent releases of the US Census Bureau's American Community Survey, specifically the "detailed tables". A good general way to learn more about the ACS is the handbooks for data users, some of which are tailored to specific kinds of data users -- see https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/guidance/handbooks.html for the complete list.
We provide topical help which includes some lists of subsets of the available tables -- see https://censusreporter.org/topics/ So many tables include 'age' as part of the tabulation that we don't provide a list of those, as such, so you'd have to pick through the different pages.
Given that the ACS has well over 1000 detailed tables, there isn't a very convenient list of all of them, but Census Bureau has two Excel files (one for the 2019 1-year release and one for the 2015-2019 5-year release) which list them all, available here: https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/summary_file/2019/documentation/tech_docs/
Besides the detailed tables, Census releases ACS data in other formats which are sometimes more convenient, but does not release them in a format suitable for import into Census Reporter. We've tried to make a complete list of these other products here: https://censusreporter.org/topics/table-codes/#topic-elsewhere
Note that Census' rules about releasing personally identifiable information prevent any one table from combining all the factors you list, so you'll have to go to multiple tables. It is possible, in principle, to create "custom" tabulations using the public use microdata series (aka PUMS). One of the handbooks at the link above goes more into PUMS data, as does this article we sponsored on Open News's Source website: https://source.opennews.org/articles/when-and-how-use-census-microdata/
If you identify a specific "detailed table" for which you want figures, you should be able to directly search by table code in Census Reporter: that is, enter something like "B01001" in the "Explore" search on the front page, or in the search at the top of every page. You can also just edit the table details URLs (like https://censusreporter.org/tables/B01001/) to change the table code to another. Watch the videos on our home page for more about using the detailed data tables.
Hope this helps. Feel free to ask more questions using "contact support".
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2 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment Unfortunately, the US Census Bureau does not generally include people experiencing homelessness in the American Community Survey.
For the decennial census, there are some efforts, described on this page https://www.census.gov/library/fact-sheets/2020/dec/2020-census-counts-homeless.html
The American Community Survey bases its estimate primarily upon people who receive a survey at their home mailing address. There are also efforts to count the "group quarters population" (see https://censusreporter.org/topics/group-quarters/ for some more) but that data is only released at the national level, and even there, the homeless population is not clearly separated from "other non-institutional".
I also found this 2012 book, "Small Populations, Large Effects: Improving the Measurement of the Group Quarters Population in the American Community Survey", which no doubt does much deeper (contents free online at https://www.nap.edu/read/13387/chapter/1 )
For the foreseeable future, Census Reporter is limited to data in the American Community Survey, but even were we to expand, it would likely only be to other official US Census sources.
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10 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment We've been doing some low-level work in this area which may help people with some comfort with coding -- see https://github.com/censusreporter/acs-aggregate There is example code with lots of documentation that might help you get what you need, but you have to be comfortable at least copying and editing python code for now.
For Census Reporter itself, to support importing files and such adds not only its own complexity but also user authentication, secure user resource-storage, and such... so that's a lot of friction. But we're thinking about this.
An error occurred while saving the comment We like this idea, although note that the American Community Survey doesn't go down to the block level -- only block group.
We've experimented with aggregation--there are open questions about how to aggregate medians, the GINI index, and a few other non-count estimates--but mostly, this is a user interface challenge. Our requests for more funding are focused on adding historic ACS data and representing change over time on profile pages and in data downloads, but arbitrary geographies are a close second.
For future conversation, there are also precision challenges with using GIS files to select Census geographies: for example, as implemented now, our query for "Census Tracts in Chicago" includes some from Indiana as well, because it's done with GIS instead of against the Census explicit delineation.
Another question: how to handle split geographies? Block groups are kind of small, so maybe it's based on a percentage of land inside the selection region? But the land in the region may not be the land where people live...
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35 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment For what it's worth, a precursor to Census Reporter makes 2010 (and 2000) Decennial Census data easier to use for limited geographies -- see http://census.ire.org
We would need to secure new funding to add Decennial Census data.
An error occurred while saving the comment This is a reasonable idea, although some more information about why its useful is welcome. Are you looking for block-level data? or just for the specific decennial figures for certain cases?
Would you want it just in table form? Or would you somehow want to see the profile pages also integrate decennial data?
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5 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment Can you be more clear about what you're looking at/for? For example, here's a link to the Race & Ethnicity chart for Cook County, IL: https://censusreporter.org/profiles/05000US17031-cook-county-il/#race
That kind of chart is on every Census Reporter profile page, including all county pages.
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5 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment Census Reporter does, in fact, include 5-year estimates; however, to simplify things for less technical users, the system only presents 5-year estimates when 1-year estimates are not available or not appropriate. Therefore, on profile pages for places of population 65,000 or more, most data comes from 1-year estimates, although in some cases, the Census Bureau suppresses 1-year data (mostly for tables with very fine-grained distinctions), in which case you'll see a note on the page indicating that a certain chart or figure comes from the 5-year data instead.
when getting data for a specific table, again, Census Reporter tries to make the smart choice. If all of your geographies are 65,000 or larger, then Census Reporter uses 1-year data, but if any of the geographies are too small to be included in the 1-year release, then 5-year data is used for all geographies -- that is, if you have a city such as Chicago and a census tract in the same query, then data for both will come from the 5-year release.
At this time, there is no interface for forcing Census Reporter to give 5-year data in these cases. The API does support getting data for a specific release -- see api.censusreporter.org for more details.
Specifically, this the default URL call to get data for table B13016 for the state of Wisconsin:
https://api.censusreporter.org/1.0/data/show/latest?table_ids=B13016&geo_ids=04000US55
Using "latest" in the URL leaves the choice of release up to Census reporter, and in the above case, gets ACS 1 year data. However, one can specify the release, like this:
https://api.censusreporter.org/1.0/data/show/acs2017_5yr?table_ids=B13016&geo_ids=04000US55
However, note that we are unable to support access to all past ACS releases. We only support the current release. URLs using "latest" will always work, but each fall, as the new ACS data is loaded into Census Reporter, the part of URLs specifying the release would need to be updated.
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4 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment Thanks for the input. Unfortunately, Census Reporter is an independent project, unaffiliated with the US Census Bureau. We are only able to work with the data as it is published.
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2 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment Yes, this is an interesting idea, and one we've talked about to some extent. We'd love to hear more from other members of our community about how this might be fleshed out.
Census Reporter's shape files are as they are provided by the US Census Bureau, because data tabulations are aligned with the official maps. We update the maps when we update American Community Survey data.