Friday, June 20, 2014

ACS, SABINS: Wrangling census data for school-level analysis

[Post in progress] Your nerd giggle of the day: My phone keeps auto-correcting ACS (the American Community Survey) to ACA (the Affordable Care Act). It has also been correcting TTFN (ta-ta for now!) to TANF (Temporary Aid for Needy Families, or, the federal grant that provides public assistance or "welfare"). I find this really amusing.

Continuing the project from earlier  - one step forward, two steps back, more forward.

Looking for resources on graphics for another project, I found the choropleth package.

Alas, while it DOES do zip codes, this package does not go all the way down to the block or even block group level data.
Nested Census geographies (from census.gov)
BUT! This lead me to the acs package, from Ezra Haber Glenn outta MIT. And although the documentation only discusses up thru ACS 5-year 2011, the Census API now goes up through 2012. Yay! Could have saved me a bunch of time in pulling the raw data itself.... Alas. Now to install. Walking through the tutorial (essentially) and pulling the necessary code for the county, by block or block group. [Use pretty R to make the R snippets look pretty]

% related to links to look at later - http://gadm.org/ 

No comments:

Post a Comment