• How to read the ACS data into SAS?

    Greetings! How to read the data from Table DP05 of the 2019 American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year estimates into SAS? When I deleted the second row on variable definition and read it into SAS, errors came (copied below). When I read all lines starting…

  • Calculating a Median From a Weighted Distribution

    I'm reading through the PDF "Understanding and Using American Community Survey Data - What State and Local Government Users Need to Know" and need help recreating the calculation for the median salary in Case Study #1 as shown in Figure 3.8…

  • RE: Zip Code Population by County

    Geocorr works by reducing both source and target geographies into collections of blocks -- the "atoms", if you will. We know the population of every block. So we can take all the blocks that are in ZCTA 21771 (say) and add up the populations of all those…

  • Design Factor for Poverty Status

    Hi, 

     

    I'm looking to cross tabulate a few different variables with a dichotomous poverty variable (below threshold or not) in the 1-year PUMS.  I derived the poverty status variable by recoding the income to poverty ratio.  Unfortunately the statistical…

  • RE: Using ACS for Complex Data Dives

    I'm going to give my advice -- for any one who is new (or sort of new) to digging into ACS.
    First piece of advice: Orient yourself by reviewing a list of all the published summary tables in ACS (there's over 1,200 distinct tables).  Here:  www…
  • Households by type difference between DHC and ACS

    We were asked to create a timeline of the local number of households with children by household type. We extracted data from past Censuses, Census 2020 and recent 1-year ACS. We noticed some differences between the ACS and the DHC counts that seemed to…

  • RE: which questions used to create which tables

    Hi Gene,

    If you look in the Subject Definitions file found here:
    www2.census.gov/.../2015_ACSSubjectDefinitions.pdf

    On page 73 it defines hispanic or latino origin and provides quite a bit of detail about how the data are derived. Also, it gives you…
  • RE: allocating median household income across Census boundaries

    Hi, Mara -- taking a weighted average of block group medians can give you misleading results, because the median depends on the income distributions of the different block groups. If the block group pieces you're combining have roughly symmetrical distributions…

  • RE: 2021 ACS tracts and PUMAS

    Dear Andy,

    The relationship file that I referenced is for the 2020 PUMAs  (posted on the census website) but they are not in use yet for the current 2021 PUMS data (I use the API).  The relationship file in the post has a lot of PUMAs that do not exist…

  • RE: I'm finally starting to run tabulations from the new 5 year file ...

    Hi Robin,

    The second question is easiest to answer – use the Pwgtp column to calculate total number of people. For each line in the spreadsheet, Pwgtp can be compared to LoVal and HiVal to see how accurate the number is (LoVal and HiVal are just Pwgtp…