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Hi, I am Alexandra Barker.
There are so many great resources for you to access census data.
You can visit census.gov,
but you can also use resources that were created by the data user community.
What I want to share with you today is one of my favorite resources created by the data user community.
It's called Census Reporter.
Yes, at first, it was created to help reporters
easily access American Community Survey data for their stories;
but it has proven to be helpful to all levels of data users.
To access economic,
demographic, and housing data from the American Community Survey.
So, I invited today my colleague Mary McKay who also loves this resource,
to show us how to use Census Reporter.
Let's check it out.
Hi everyone, my name is Mary McKay, and I'm a survey statistician at the U.S. Census Bureau.
I work on the American Community Survey or ACS.
The ACS is a nationwide survey that collects and produces information on social, economic,
housing, and demographic characteristics about our nation's population every year.
Today I'm going to introduce you to a helpful tool that allows you
to explore and visualize ACS data across numerous topics and geography levels.
Census Reporter is a project at Northwestern University to make ACS data easier to use.
To start, let's navigate to censusreporter.org.
There are many features of this website.
The first option you see here at the top is profile.
This option allows users to search for an address and find its associated geographic levels.
From there, you can explore numerous estimates from census data for that specific area.
Below that, there is the explore option,
which lets you investigate census tables by topic or table id.
You can pick a topic such as race or age,
select a table of your choice then choose
your level of geography.
The main difference between these two searches is profile
starts with geographies and then focuses on data.
Whereas explorer lets you choose specific data tables to examine,
and then you can add a level of geography to those tables.
It's also important to note that Census Reporter has several videos on how to use their tools
as well as specific examples to show you some of the things you can do with their resource.
Going back to the top, I'm going to use the profile option to search
using an address and find data based on its geographic levels.
Let's enter this address in the profile search bar
1201 East 10th Street Jeffersonville,
Indiana.
As I start typing, I'll see addresses pop up; you just have to make sure that you're picking the right one.
Here,
this is the address that I want.
So, after you select your address, you see a map of the area.
I can choose from several geographies, and for the most part, they go in order from smallest to largest.
As I hover over the geography,
you can see on the map what it includes.
It's up to you to determine which one you want to use.
To start, let's pick place.
The Census Bureau uses this term to refer to most cities,
some towns,
villages, and boroughs.
Places are a concentration of population either legally bounded as an incorporated place
or identified as a census-designated place.
You can click more about the geography by clicking it over here.
So, clicking on the place,
we see that this address falls in Jeffersonville, Indiana.
This place falls in Clark County, IN,
Louisville/Jefferson County, KY-IN Metro Area,
Indiana,
United States.
The population, according to the 2015-2019 ACS 5-year estimates,
was 47,673
for this geography.
Census Reporter uses the ACS 5-year estimates
but make sure you check in this first box to see which estimate Census Reporter uses for their measures.
If you continue scrolling down, there are several demographic estimates that are highlighted for this place.
For example, we see age, sex, and race in this first demographics block.
As you review these estimates, hover over the graphs, and you will see comparisons with related geographies
such as
the Louisville/Jefferson County, KY-IN Metro Area, and Indiana.
As we continue,
the next block is economic characteristics such as income,
poverty,
and commuting information.
Hover over numbers, and you can see margins of error with these figures and the areas of comparison.
Next Census Reporter displays family characteristics.
Another feature is clicking the show data on the right here.
So, Census Reporter displays the table where the data is extracted from,
and you can even click view table
to see the full data beyond this preview.
The next highlighted category is housing.
Notice that Census Reporter highlights the margin of error of estimates with a dagger symbol
when the margin of error is at least 10 percent of the total value,
as you see with these estimates.
The final set of estimates shared by Census Reporter is social, which includes
educational attainment,
language, place of birth, and veteran status.
You might notice here
that there are some n/a estimates.
Like here, for persons with language other than English spoken at home.
I hope that this data gem was useful in explaining the key features of the Census Reporter.
It is a versatile tool that can help you quickly visualize key estimates from the ACS.
Mary, thank you so much for sharing such a great resource with us.
For more videos like this,
visit census.gov/academy and subscribe.
Thank you!
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