Using American Community Survey to Understand Your Community

through customizing tables. It uses ACS data to investigate change over time and shows you how to download the data you retrieve.

Because this publication serves only as an introduction and not an exhaustive guide to using ACS, its final section provides you with tools that you can use to explore these data further on your own. The Census Bureau and other agencies and organizations make many datasets publicly available and build tools that allow you to interact with the data without any prior training or technical skills. At the end of this publication, we provide a list and short descriptions of Census Bureau data tools that may be relevant to your work, as well as a glossary of terms we use in our case studies for your reference.

Understanding the Amer ican Communi ty Survey

We hope that this publication serves as a practical introduction to using data — ACS in particular — to better understand the community you serve and gives you the skills you need to incorporate it into your Extension work. Let’s get started!

American Community Survey

The U.S. Census Bur eau’s American Community Survey (ACS) is an ongoing, nationally representative household survey. Administered in all fifty states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, it is the largest survey the agency conducts; approximately 3.5 million households complete it every year via mail, phone, internet, or in-person interviews. ACS contains information on demographic characteristics like gender, age, race, ethnicity, family and household composition, educational attainment, employment and income, migration, ancestry, citizenship, disability, insurance, social program participation, housing, and more. It is a rich data resource that helps local and state governments, federal agencies, non-profit institutions, and other organizations make informed decisions about funding and planning. It also allows them to learn about their constituents and improve their communities.

Learning to use data to better understand the community you serve is also the goal of this practical guide. Given the ACS’s wealth of information on individuals’, families’, and

household s’ social and economic characteristics, we will use the survey in our examples and show you how to navigate the Census Bureau’s portal to find data that can inform your decisions. The two sections below provide background on the ACS geographic areas and time frames that we will cover in our examples.

ACS Geographic Areas

ACS data are available for multiple geographic areas. While we can use it to find information about the entire nation, a state, or a county as a whole, its granularity also allows us to retrieve data for geographies smaller than a county. For Extension professionals and other stakeholders working with communities, this is an important feature that helps draw insights about social and economic conditions in local areas. For example, the ACS not only would tell you the unemployment rate for the state of Virginia, but it will also tell you the unemployment rate in a given county, like Patrick County, and even for smaller, neighborhood-level areas within Patrick County.

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