hh_acs_measures

Harmonized Historical ACS Measures

About

This R code generates the Harmonized Historical ACS Measures (hh_acs_measures) data resource. Census tract-level measures derived from the American Community Survey (ACS) are generally available annually from 2013 through 2022 and were selected to cover three domains:

• Population: number of kids, number of households with kids, single-parent households, racial and ethnic composition, limited English speaking households
• Socioeconomic: education, income, poverty, employment, health insurance, SNAP receipt
• Housing: vacancy, age, substandard conditions, monthly rent and housing costs

Accessing Data

Read the hh_acs_measures tabular data resource into R directly from the release using the fr package:

fr::read_fr_tdr("https://github.com/geomarker-io/hh_acs_measures/releases/download/v1.2.0/")

Alternatively, read the CSV file into R with:

readr::read_csv("https://github.com/geomarker-io/hh_acs_measures/releases/download/v1.2.0/hh_acs_measures.csv")

View field metadata

Data Details

Types of ACS measures

Each of the derived ACS measures are expressed in one of three ways:

1. measures starting with n_ represent a number of something, such as n_household
   • always rounded to the nearest integer
2. measures starting with fraction_ represent a fraction of some total, such as fraction_poverty
   • bounded between 0 and 1
   • always rounded to three decimal places (e.g. 0.064)
3. measures starting with median_ represent a median of a number in a population, such as median_income
   • always expressed using three significant digits (e.g., 5,410 and 145,000)

Currency adjustments for purchasing power over time

Measures that are reported in US Dollars (e.g., Median Household Income) are adjusted for changes in purchasing power over time by using the annual Consumer Price Index. The ‘Consumer Price Index retroactive series using current methods’ (R-CPI-U-RS) produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics harmonizes historical annual indices by incorporating methodological improvements into earlier calculations with new releases. This means that hh_acs_measures fields that are adjusted for inflation in prior years will likely be scaled to a different number in later releases.

Missing Data

Some data are unavailable in certain earlier years because the question was not included in the ACS that year. Additionally, data summaries may be suppressed by the census bureau.

Margin of error

Each measure includes a accompanying margin of error (or _moe) variable, such as median_income_moe, that is calculated using the ACS’s suggested methodology implemented in tidycensus.