Accessing Summary Data Using American FactFinder:
Poverty Status for Places in the US – 2006
What’s up with College Station, TX? Surprising Poverty Hot Spots
American FactFinder (AFF) is an interface the Census Bureau has developed for accessing summary data. Users have the choice of downloading the raw data, but the AFF interface is the preferred method for most users. The raw data are in multiple files – 145 comma delimited files per state for the 2006 American Community Survey (ACS), which makes them awkward to use.
American Factfinder is available from the front page of the Census Bureau website – along the left navigation bar:
In this exercise, we will download poverty data for all places in the United States. To start, click on the ‘American Factfinder link’ from the Census Bureau homepage – along the left navigation bar.
The first step is to determine which file to use. The default data choice is the Decennial Census. Select ‘get data’ under American Community Survey:
There are many choices for the dissemination of the tables – profiles, geographic comparisons, subject, ranking, detailed, etc. There are pluses and minuses to each dissemination type.
We will start with detailed tables. Their plus is that they allow one to go across geographies across states (using geo within geo). They also go down to a finer geographic detail than ranking and geographic comparison tables.
The detailed tables provide one with the most detail on subject matter, which allows some discretion on concept definitions. For instance, for poverty status, one could define poverty status as the proportion of the population at 125% of the poverty line and below or the proportion below 50% of the poverty line. Or, one can define the Arab population by selecting specific ancestry groups, rather than using the broad geographic region, which would also include Israel. However, sometimes the detail is overwhelming.
The default for the American Community Survey is the most recent year, 2006. To the right, are the table choices. Select ‘Detailed.’
Along the top navigation are several choices for selection method. Select ‘geo withingeo.’
Under Show me all, select ‘places’
Select ‘all places’ under the heading ‘Select one or more geographic areas’
click ‘Add’
click ‘Next’
To choose a table, it is best to use subject or keyword to cut down on the number of tables, unless one knows the table number.
Select ‘Subject’
Choose ‘Economic Characteristics/Poverty (Families and Individuals)’
and then Click on ‘Search’
There are over 100 detailed poverty tables so there is still quite a bit to wade through. On occasion, there are tables with exactly the same title, with one in a black font and the other in a blue font. The blue font is a simpler version of the table, e.g., with fewer categories.
To see what the table layout is, highlight the table title and click on ‘What’s This?’
We will select two tables:
C17002 – Ratio of Income to Poverty Level in the Past 12 months
C17017 – Poverty Status by Household Type
Highlight ‘C17002 – Ratio. . . and click on ‘Add’
Repeat for C17017
Click on ‘Show Results’
The results are presented for the first table for the first few places. One can click through ‘next’ to go through the results, but it is more efficient to download the tables. This also allows you to manipulate the data so that you can create poverty rates. As an aside, the profiles, ranking tables, geographic comparisons, etc. usually include percentages. Thus, they can be considered closer to presentation-ready.
To download the table, click on ‘Print/Download’ on the horizontal navigation bar.
Slide to ‘Download.’ Within download, choose ‘Comma delimited’ within the ‘Database’ option and click on ‘OK.’
The next choice is to save to disk. The default for the classroom PCs is for the download to go to the desktop. The default name of the file is Output.zip.
Right click on the icon for Output.zip and select ‘Rename.’ Rename the file to Example1_Places.zip.
Click on ‘Example1_Places.zip’ on the desktop.
This invokes Winzip on the PC. Click on the first/largest file in the list: ‘dt_acs_2006. .’
Save it to the desktop as ‘Exercise1_Places.txt.’
[Go to Excel Tips Document for instructions on importing the file to Excel and for help with manipulating the data]
Example1_Places.xls is a summary of these two detailed tables. One can sort the data to see which places have the highest poverty rates. If one sorts by poverty for persons, the top 10 places are:
Geography / Poverty (Persons)Brownsville city, Texas / 40.56%
College Station city, Texas / 37.25%
Camden city, New Jersey / 35.57%
Edinburg city, Texas / 35.42%
Bloomington city, Indiana / 34.71%
Flint city, Michigan / 34.15%
Kalamazoo city, Michigan / 33.36%
Florence-Graham CDP, California / 33.04%
Gary city, Indiana / 32.83%
Muncie city, Indiana / 32.64%
Several of these places are a surprise: College Station, Bloomington, and Muncie are not among the normal poverty hot spots in the nation.
These communities fall into the top 10 based on the fact that they have a large proportion of non-family households, which on average have higher poverty rates than family households (19.6% vs 12.7%). In addition, students usually have low incomes, which makes these non-family households even poorer than average.
For instance, the poverty rate for non-family households in these college towns is as follows: College Station (58%), Bloomington (40%) and Muncie (37%). This is much higher than the national average for non-family households (13%). The fact that parents may be contributing to rent, tuition, and providing health insurance coverage, etc. to some/many of these students is not reflected in the household income the students report.
It is instructive to sort these data by household type. For instance, if one looks at married couple households (ascending), the list of places looks more familiar:
Geography / Married Couple Families / Poverty (HHLDS) / Poverty (Married Couples)East Orange city, New Jersey / 0.201419 / 28.20% / 12.31%
Trenton city, New Jersey / 0.221306 / 24.09% / 4.40%
Washington city, District of Columbia / 0.223077 / 16.97% / 5.70%
Camden city, New Jersey / 0.226361 / 34.96% / 18.80%
Rochester city, New York / 0.22657 / 27.17% / 7.76%
Richmond city, Virginia / 0.23555 / 18.44% / 4.79%
Flint city, Michigan / 0.23555 / 28.24% / 11.74%
Syracuse city, New York / 0.23646 / 26.81% / 6.62%
Cleveland city, Ohio / 0.238968 / 24.62% / 9.68%
Detroit city, Michigan / 0.239489 / 28.52% / 11.94%
Only 20 % of the households in East Orange, New Jersey are married couple families and for the 10th place in the list (Detroit) the percentage has only climbed to 24%. Nation-wide the average percentage of households that are married couples is 61%. However, these 10 places with low proportions of married couples do not have the highest poverty rates for married couple families. Listed below are the places that have the highest poverty rate among married couple families:
Geography / Married Couple Families / Poverty (HHLDS) / Poverty (Married Couples)Edinburg city, Texas / 0.511151 / 33.29% / 31.30%
Brownsville city, Texas / 0.525633 / 37.32% / 27.39%
Florence-Graham CDP, California / 0.509627 / 32.22% / 26.95%
Compton city, California / 0.445695 / 22.30% / 19.71%
Camden city, New Jersey / 0.226361 / 34.96% / 18.80%
Laredo city, Texas / 0.56369 / 28.34% / 17.51%
East Los Angeles CDP, California / 0.449022 / 21.21% / 16.38%
Inglewood city, California / 0.416831 / 19.33% / 16.10%
Miami city, Florida / 0.339245 / 27.88% / 15.97%
Passaic city, New Jersey / 0.424778 / 25.29% / 15.83%
These places are much more dominated by areas with a legacy of agricultural migrant labor.