Questions for the Census Bureau?

All the best sir, great chance to prove what you are at high end. I hope some or other time you would also visit our Rayalaseema University . Thank you sir.

Ari – In general, I find it very difficult to simply find the tables I’m interested in from ACS. For example, if I wanted to look through the different variables they have for “rent” and I issue a term search using the API, I get thousands of results back which I have to carefully read through one by one, and the table names are long and complicated. Then there is the issue of availability by different spans and ending years. Overall, it would be great if the data were simply more searchable.

Hi,

I think basic, super simple, clear statistics in an Excel file or, better yet, csv should be available in an incredibly painless way. Namely, I understand that American Fact Finder exists, but sometimes it needs to be simpler than that. For example, if I Google “census data by county” this absolutely should not be the thing that comes up :

http://censtats.census.gov/usa/usa.shtml

Let me know what you think.

Alex

Comgratulations!

I’d appreciate learning more about how their data is collected and verted in the first place.

Under what circumstances is a statistical model implemented in place of a true census?

Additionally, would they consider taking a more active role in publicizing their findings to the general public?

This isn’t strictly related to the Census Bureau, but I am wondering if you know of free, open-source software that would allow me to generate shapefiles to use in R.

I’d like to know the most direct way to import a subset of census tract shapefiles into R for the purpose of making choropleths illustrating demographic variables.

Less of a question a more of a request and observation. I noticed that the census.gov/data.html page has many visualizations but no data tables. While there are many interesting visualizations, and they may prompt some creative spin-offs, the main focus should be on the data and code to generate visualizations, not just the final image. There seems to be more focus on “tools” and less focus on data availability. Perhaps a census.gov Github repository would be a great place to compile code used for the visualizations.

One of the things that has become increasingly frustrating with the move to ACS-based core statistics (for me at least) has been trying to figure out which data elements are available without suppression at the lowest levels of geography, in particular block groups in the 5-year ACS summarizations. As readers of this blog will likely appreciate, this is particularly an issue with thematic mapping and spatial modeling applications, where in my experience there are often substantial voids in whatever data element you are looking for, at least in some of the more specialized topical areas (commuting, occupations etc). A related issue is that the technical documentation on which tables are available at which levels of geography would nominally show these layers as ‘available’, at least at an overall table level (ie., this layer exists for SOME geographies at this level).

With the understanding that these suppression rules are deterministic by nature, and there is not much that can be done about them by nature:

Is there some sort of meta-documentation on invocation of the suppression rules on a table (or table and data element) basis, this would at least allow the analyst to see which layers are actually complete from a basic data-resolution standpoint. Ideally (for me, at least) this would be bucketed by Metro area, so that we could see in a specific use context whether or not the data is actually available, and how many geo-units are suppressed …this would be very useful…haven’t found it if this type of document/file exists…

Like timothyjkiely, Alex Thompson, and Joel, I would like easier access to the tables I am looking for, some basic things that people (especially students) request commonly, and a better way to know if they will be available for the geography I am interested in. My rant on Census data has some more thoughts: http://www.science.smith.edu/~amcnamara/blog/teaching/2016/11/16/CensusRant.html Is your meeting related to the rollout of https://data.census.gov/preview/ ?

Census already has a page that provides SAS users (& Excel users) helpful resources related to the American Community Survey, like data formatted for SAS and sample code. Census should provide similar resources for R users.
See:
http://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/technical-documentation/summary-file-documentation.html