Hello,
Since census tracts can split, merge, or otherwise change at the decennial census (so most recently, with the 2020 census), I'm wondering if anyone has been successful analyzing census tract data from year to year as census tracts change (i.e., in a line chart), and if so, how you went about doing that?
Thanks!
-D
Regarding your hope to analyze tract data "from year to year," you should know that no Census Bureau data products directly support the measurement of annual changes in census tracts. That would require a massive sample of the population every year. The ACS is big, but not that big, which is why ACS data for small areas are available only in 5-year pooled samples. As such, you can use ACS data to compare tract characteristics in two non-overlapping 5-year periods, but you can't directly derive measures of annual change. This Census Bureau blog post provides more background and guidance about this.
Thanks for this info, Jonathan Schroeder. I'm sorry, I should have clarified that the main data I'm trying to analyze over time by census tract is our own data and not the ACS data. So analyzing our own data for each year isn't a problem for us, but the changing census tract boundaries make this difficult. I can see the crosswalk files being useful for this, so I will definitely check those out!