Tips and Documentation
Another Tool for Calculating ACS Margins of Error and Significance
Daniel Sheres at the D.C. Office of Planning has compiled all the equations for calculating ACS statistics (margins of error, statistical significance, etc.) into the following spreadsheet:
End-User Testing of DataFerrett
Doug Hillmer is currently working with the Census Bureau team of programmers that supports the DataFerrett application to help them improve the overall usability of the application. An essential step in this project is an end-user test currently planned for mid-November. Doug is leading this test effort. He has asked the SDC Steering Committee to inform the entire SDC network about this upcoming test and to pass on his call for participation by SDC members who use DataFerrett (either occasionally or frequently).
Doug has promised send out materials to each participating tester well in advance. Recognizing that we all have our regular work to get done, the tests are being planned to keep the burden minimal (hopefully, under two hours) for each participating tester. The entire end-user testing effort will occur over a period of 3 days (exact dates to be announced).
We hope SDC members using DataFerrett will agree to participate, since this effort will contribute to enhanced usability of this important application. To volunteer to participate or to request more information, send Doug an email at dhillmer1@yahoo.com.
Statistical Calculator
Doug Hillmer has prepared the following presentation and documentation on the statistical calculator. This tool will allow users to calculator margins of error (MOE) to be used in conjunction with data products published from the American Community Survey.
Click here for the PowerPoint that was presented as a webinar on October 15, 2010 for APDU (Association of Public Data Users).
Click here to view the requirements documentation for the statistical calculator.
Embedding Participation Rates on Your Website
Using the “Track Participation Rate” option on the Take 10 map, you can grab a widget to display the daily rate for your specific geography, but it doesn’t actually give you all the code you need.
Here is the code it gives you, which is really just a URL link:
http://2010.census.gov/2010census/take10map/2010partcipationrateswidget.php?loc=18
Here is the full code you need to add to your webpage in order to actually display this as part of a page, as seen on Indiana’s site:
A few things to note
- You’ll change the “src=” URL in the above code to the URL you get from the “Track Participation Rate” link on the Take 10 map . (Alternatively, the last piece of the URL “loc=” refers to state, county, township, or tract FIPS code so you could just change it and skip the Take10 map step).
- At the moment, there doesn’t seem to be a way to use this widget for places (not sure if that’s intentional or just a bug). If you’re on a place on the Take10 map and click “Track Participation Rate,” you just receive the link for the state rate. And manually adding in the FIPS code doesn’t seem to work either.
UPDATE: Clifford Holley pointed out that the FIPS option is now working for places (example). Update the “loc=” command to use the 2-digit state FIPS plus the 5-digit place FIPS. (For those who don’t know city/town FIPS off the top of your head, the Missouri Data Center has compiled them for easy reference: http://mcdc2.missouri.edu/pub/webrepts/commoncodes/)
- You can set the width bigger, but 200 pixels wide is as small as this will go without doing some nasty things with text wrapping.
- All the quote marks in the code should be straight quotes and not curly quotes (I can’t get WordPress to accurately render them). If this gives you an encoding error when you try to paste it into your site, simply replace the quote marks.