This regards those new Connecticut "county equivalents" or "planning regions."My apologies if this issue has already been covered and I overlooked it.www.federalregister.gov/.../change-to-county-equivalents-in-the-state-of-connecticut
Some users have helpfully pointed out how data for the new areas can be aggregated from lower-level geographies, such as county subdivisions.Which is fine, if one has the data at those more detailed geo levels.But what about the wealth of useful data published at the county levels (such as health indicators)? How might we convert new data for the "county equivalents" back to the previous CT county structure so it can be used with pre-existing data for analysis, comparison, reporting, trends, etc. We don't want to leave a big hole for the state of Connecticut until all agencies and companies switch over to the new counties in a year or two.Or when we switch over to the new CT regions to include in our list of all US counties, how should we convert data for the earlier CT counties to its new CT equivalent geographies?
The only workable solution I can imagine to convert new CT counties to previous counties (and vice versa) is to create an allocation table which shows the percent of each existing CT county in the new regions/equivalents. The value for allocation would be either area or population.Anyone have a better idea? Would this approach give "good enough" estimates of the new counties?
Thanks,Bert Sperlingbestplaces.net
This is the general approach I use in Geocorr. You can allocate by area or population, but in practice, I almost never use area.
Here are a couple of tables I just made. One is a list showing (2020) county…
Thanks! I did a little searching and found this bit here: "ACS 5-year Comparison Profiles for Connecticut county-equivalent geographies will not be available until the 2027 ACS release at which time…
Jonathan and Glenn,Thanks very much for your comments on this issue.I agree that using lower-level data and aggregating it to the new 2022 county equivalents is the best solution. When using Census and ACS data, that lower-level detail data is almost always available with a little digging.But there's a wealth of other data sets which are only available by county, such as the CDC's BRFSS health statistics and BLS economic data. In those cases, we'll need to convert data between the old and new Connecticut counties/equivalents, at least until all agencies get on the same page.
Glenn, thank you for the allocation tables! I was in the process of creating my own, but I'll use yours instead. And you bring up some good points about the fallout which will come creating these new counties and their fips codes.What a mess. I wonder if these changes were actually needed or just a whim of the Connecticut legislature.
Bert
Bert Sperling said:I wonder if these changes were actually needed or just a whim of the Connecticut legislature.
The FR notice you linked says CT counties "ceased to function as governmental and administrative entities in 1960". I'm not familiar with the history of these planning regions, but it seems they have had substantial administrative function since 2015 or so, though not taxation. They are about the same size as counties. It makes sense.
I wonder if we're going to see anything similar happening with Rhode Island, which also doesn't have county government -- or is RI too small to warrant second level administration?