RE: Poverty in S0201 vs B17001

Elise Parks — Tue, 23 Feb 2021 20:56:27 GMT

An update for anyone else who is interested in these two tables in the future: the estimates DO match and it was my own calculation that was off. The confidence intervals I calculated using the B table are slightly wider than the S table, which is probably to be expected from aggregating the MOEs. And I also discovered C17001, which is preferable to the B table as it provides numbers for 65+ and also has race tables available; and all 3 tables are giving me the same estimates!

RE: Poverty in S0201 vs B17001

Joe Germuska — Mon, 22 Feb 2021 20:48:18 GMT

I've never seen any documentation for the subject tables (or the "selected population profiles", which technically, is what S0201 is, despite having a "table code" that makes it look like a subject table)

However, just looking at the numbers for the percentages under "all people", one has to guess that the denominator is roughly "of all people of the same age", not "of all people" or "of all people in poverty". (I roughed that out comparing B17001 and B01001 )

I'd love to see systematic metadata documentation, and it seems like it could be integrated into the API system with the "variables" metadata, like https://api.census.gov/data/2019/acs/acs1/spp/variables/S0201_262E.json