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school enrollment
margin of error
standard error
acs tables
Small area data
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Standard errors for tract-level school enrollment ratios from ACS tables
Patrick Guyer
over 10 years ago
My organization often needs to estimate the net school enrollment ratio of children and youth ages 3-24 (inclusive) for various levels of geography including census tracts. For larger geographies, we estimate this directly from the PUMS and calculate standard errors using replicate weights. For tracts though we’re stuck with what we can get from Table B14003 SEX BY SCHOOL ENROLLMENT BY TYPE OF SCHOOL BY AGE FOR THE POPULATION 3 YEARS AND OVER. Obtaining the numerator, the total number of students enrolled in public or private school between the ages of 3 and 24, requires summing 24 individual estimates in the table, which breaks enrollment down by age, gender, and control of school. I’ve used the methods outlined by Census in their “Accuracy of the Data” documents to obtain the approximated SE for this sum but I have serious doubts that these approximations tell us much of anything given that so many individual MoE estimates have to be aggregated. Does anyone have a suggestion for a better way to calculate or even indirectly estimate the SE for school enrollment of this age range at the census tract level? Thank you!
Parents
David Folch
over 10 years ago
You could even get it down to five with...
total population 3 and over - (males 25 To 34 Years not enrolled + males 35 Years And Over not enrolled + females 25 To 34 Years not enrolled + females 35 Years And Over not enrolled)
A big picture approach to this problem would be if the Census Bureau released more crosstabs. In this particular example you could imagine an extra block of results not split by gender, this would get the computation down to three values.
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David Folch
over 10 years ago
You could even get it down to five with...
total population 3 and over - (males 25 To 34 Years not enrolled + males 35 Years And Over not enrolled + females 25 To 34 Years not enrolled + females 35 Years And Over not enrolled)
A big picture approach to this problem would be if the Census Bureau released more crosstabs. In this particular example you could imagine an extra block of results not split by gender, this would get the computation down to three values.
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