I'm trying to get detailed data on languages spoken at home to do an LEP study. I'm able to get the data by PUMA; however, my city is lumped in with two other cities, with no way to segregate them.
Is there some other way to do this? We're on the hook for non-English language support but can't get granular-enough data to figure out which languages we have to service. Thanks in advance.
For city (sumlevel 160) and tracts (sum level 140), have you looked at table C16001 ? There're nine non-English languages listed
Grid View: Table C16001 - Census ReporterWhy just nine languages?
About…
Hi,
ACS Table B16002 provides detailed language data at the household level.
Data is available for municipalities and Census Tracts. You may need to isolate the tracts in your city and then aggregate them…
Perhaps whoever wrote the law should have checked what's actually available in the ACS before the law was passed.
I get difficult-to-answer questions like this a lot.
Data is available for municipalities and Census Tracts. You may need to isolate the tracts in your city and then aggregate them. The ACS handbooks provide examples of the aggregation. However, if your city is defined as a census place, you may not need to rely on the tract data.
See the spreadsheets for ACS 2018-2022 posted here: https://demography.dola.colorado.gov/assets/html/acs_spreadsheets.html
for an example of the municipality-level data. (This was generated using tidycensus and openxlsx)
Cheers
AB
Thanks! I was able to pull down the table for Buena Park. However, I need people rather than households. The law we're trying to satisfy is AB 1638, which specifies "the 5% or more of the population that speaks English less than 'very well.'”
Is there a version of this table that counts noses instead of front doors?
You might try B06007: Place of Birth by Language Spoken at Home and Ability to Speak English in the United States
Thanks. All it shows is "Spanish" and "Other Languages."
This shouldn't be this difficult.
Sorry, I misunderstood your question. I don't think the ACS includes person-level detailed languages. Perhaps the law can be amended to refer to households?
That would be nice, but since it's already law, I doubt it'll happen. The Assembly probably assumed (as I did) that the Census Bureau would make this kind of data easy to get.
If you're able to get the data by PUMA, you could do an allocation to the place level using Geocorr.
https://mcdc.missouri.edu/applications/geocorr.html
Table B16007 has gross language categories by age for persons over age 5. (Spanish, Other Indo-European, Asain, and Other)
You will not be able to get detailed languages from this table. If you need to drill down to specific language groups, allocating things from the PUMS is probably your best bet, per Glenn Rice
BTW, ALL of this information is available from the ACS table shells (https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/technical-documentation/table-shells.html) You may wish to become familiar with this document.
Cheers--
About 7 years back, Census execs determined they were publishing too much detail, on infrequent categories, and that this posed personal identifiability risks. So now, the only languages with published tabulations by Census are those nationally widespread enough.(... so, for more languages, how do you feel about 2015 data??)
Geocorr is upset with me, but I'll keep trying.
I wonder: how accurate will the results be? I'd thought about using a population-based adjustment, but that assumes the incidence of languages is uniform across the three cities in the PUMA. I know that isn't the case.
It looks like B16001 will do for a start. It has more languages split out.
There is a special file that is created every 5 years. and is in the Census Redistricting Office that uses 74 Language Minority Groups to compute the percent of LEP individuals most particularly LEP individuals who are Citizens of Voting Age by State, County and Minor Civil Division, this matched Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act. There is a table that does LEP of all sorts by Spanish and Other Languages, that follows the typical summary levels. I think it is B1608. It includes Citizens and non-citizens. The p;roblems with this are mainfold. With a reule like AB 1608, is their an age range for LEP. Households are often used for other things, because one can expect those in ahousehold to care for one another. But this is a real problem. The VRA Section 203 file is created and modelled.
Andy Beveridge
Well, fooey. The data's almost ten years old. Back to C16001.
This has been a long-standing problem since language detail was pared back in reported ACS tables (per Todd's comment below).
Outside of the resources shared by others, you may also be able to use additional (non-ACS) sources such as school district data. You can find data for the Buena Park school district data here: www.kidsdata.org/.../table