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.
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??)
It looks like B16001 will do for a start. It has more languages split out.
Well, fooey. The data's almost ten years old. Back to C16001.