Overview

This application lets you access population estimates by age, race, sex and hispanic orgin at the state and county levels for anywhere in the United States. You can choose years starting with 1990 and going to the most recently released figures (currently 2007, typically updated in August/September of each year with the previous year's data).

The source of these data is the special "bridged race" estimates created by the Census Bureau for the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). For more information regarding these estimates see our Readme page regarding that data. Users familiar with the Missouri Census Data Center's Uexplore/Dexter system for accessing data can access these data directly using those web tools and access the nchsbri subdirectory of our /pub/data/popests directory. But using this application will be a lot easier and will do most of the things that Dexter that will do.

Specifying the Parameters

• Select state(s) This allows you to choose one or more states for which data are to be extracted. Note that Missouri is the default choice. You can select all 50 of them if you want, but at the county level it will be slow.

• Select summary unit(s) By default you get summaries at both the state and county levels. Uncheck either (but not both) of these boxes to suppress data at that level.

• Specify Age Detail There are 3 mutually exclusive options here. You can take a standard set of 5-year age cohorts, with 85 and above being the final cohort (age interval). The 2nd option lets you choose a set of 5 fequently-requested intervals. The 3rd option is the most interesting, since it lets you choose your own custom intervals. You must check the button to indicate the option and then fill in the text box with your interval specs. Filling in the text box without checking the (radio) button will cause the text you entered to be ignored.

  The intervals you specify here do not have to include all ages. You can specify just a single interval, such as 0-7 if all you want are estimates of persons aged 0 through 7. ("0" is a valid age and refers to persons less than 1 year old.) You can enter multiple non-overlapping intervals separated by 1 or more blanks. Intervals are by definition pairs of numbers between 0 and 99 separated by a single dash. Examples of such entries:

  • 12-17 18-34 35-99
  • 0-1 2-3 4-5 6-7
  Note that using the value 99 as the upper limit of an interval indicates a "highest age" upper limit. On the output the age group category variable corresponding to the 35-99 interval spec will be 35+, indicating the group of persons aged 35 and over. The age detail stops at "85 and over" so entering an interval such as 85-89 makes no sense. In fact, you should only use values 0 to 84 and 99 for your interval specs. A single value in the range 85 to 98 can be entered but it will be treated the same as 99.

  The intervals can also be specified without the explicit interval notation by entering just a series of ascending age values representing the lower limits of desired intervals (except for the rightmost number, which represents the upper limit of the last interval.) The implied upper limit of each interval is 1 less than the lower limit of the following interval. Thus, entering

  0 9 19 29 49   : would be the equivalent of entering
  0-8 9-18 19-28 29-49 .

• Select Year(s) lets you indicate the time periods for which you want to see data. Your output files will contain one row/line for each geographic area by year and by age group. All values on output are July 1 estimates for the specified years. 1990 is the earliest year for which we have these estimates. The most recent year is currently (April, 2009) 2007. Hold down the ctrl key while clicking to select multiple years.

• Demographic Detail (variables) Here is where you get to indicate the kind of demographic detail you want. This application does not allow crossing the sex, race and hispanic categories with each other. (If you need that kind of detail you can visit the NCHS web site application at http://wonder.cdc.gov/Bridged-Race-v2007.HTML). Keep in mind that the race categories here are all "bridged" and do not correspond to the current, official OMB-mandated race categories that you will find used on most data files such as the American Community Survey. You should understand that being Hispanic or Latino is separate from being one of the 4 race categories. We provide counts of persons who are Black (or African American) as well as persons who are "Black Non-hispanic", meaning they are Black and also non-hispanic. Persons who are both Black and Hispanic can be easily derived by subtraction. The same applies to the other 3 race categories.

• Output Format(s) This lets you choose the format of your output file(s). The default is a comma-delimited file (which for most users will translate into an Excel file since that program can easily import such files.) You can can get a report format HTML file as well and SAS users can get their output in the form of a SAS dataset suitable for access by the Windows version of SAS, version 9 or later (and by other versions of SAS as well by using "outrep=windows" on their libname statement in Unix, for example). The csv and sas output files will include a FIPS geographic code column/variable, but this item is omitted from the HTML output report. You can, of course, choose to have multiple output files.

Running the Request and Retrieving the Results

After making all your parameter choices you click on the Run Request button at the bottom of the form to invoke the application and pass it all your choices. If all goes well, your browser screen should turn a light blue and output results should begin appearing, first a link to a Summary Log file and a message indicating ...extraction work in progress...Please be patient. Within a few seconds (depends on how much data you requested, but typical requests take only a few seconds) links to the requested output file(s) should appear in your browser window followed by an Execution completed at ... line telling you that the application has finished its work.

If you have problems and need help you can send e-mail to the author (use the link at the very bottom of the application form) and be sure to specify the Job ID which appears on the second line of your output page. It consists of the date and a sequential number, e.g. 07NOV06_00003.

Generated files will remain on the mcdc site for 48 hours. You can capture the URL of any of your output files by right-clicking on the link to the file which appears on your output menu page, and then choosing the option that lets you copy that URL (aka "shortcut") to the clipboard. You can then paste that value into an e-mail message (for example) in order to provide easy access to the result to someone else.

Output File(s)

The output files created by the application will be made up of one row/line/observation for each geographic area, year and age group. In addition to the age groups specified by the user on the form, there will also be an output row with "-All-" as the age group value; this row contains data for all persons without respect to age. The output is sorted by geographic area (state totals before county numbers, in FIPS code order), year (earliest years first) and age group (with the -All- summary preceding the specified intervals which are in ascending age order). The columns/variables include State, the name of the area summarized, the Year, an AgeGrp variable (with values of "-All-" or <low> to <high> where <low> is the lower end of the interval and <high> is the upper end.) If the interval is open-ended at the top then the dash and upper limit will be replaced by a "+", e.g. "65+" rather than "65-99". The other columns will be based upon the variables the user chose off the form. For each of those variables a corresponding percentage value will also be added. In the case of the Total population variable there is a PctAgeGrp variable which is the total population for this age group as a percentage of the geographic area's total population (for all ages). For all other variables the percentage variable will be derived by taking that variable's value as a percentage of the total population for the row (age group). So, the variable Black contains the count of persons who are counted as black or African American (bridged definition), and the PctBlack variable will indicate what percentage of the row's total population is black. For example, for the state of Missouri for year 2005, for the age in terval 0 to 17 the value of the variable Black is 216,172 and the value of Total is 1,378,232 . PctBlack is 15.7, which is 216,172 as a percentage of 1,378,232. In this same row the value of PctAgeGrp is 23.8, which indicates that 23.8% of the state's population in 2005 was in the age cohort 0-17.

For csv and SAS output files a column/variable named FIPS containing the federal code for the state or county is included. This column does not appear in HTML reports. Unfortunately, Excel strips the leading 0's from this code when it imports a csv file.

On SAS datasets the variables State and County are stored as codes but display as names using custom SAS format codes. This can cause an error when attempting to open in SAS unless you either

1. tell it to ignore the format codes or
2. provide SAS with access to those format codes.

To do the former just submit the SAS statement

                  options nofmterr; .

To provide access to the format codes you can access the necessary SAS code on the MCDC web site at http://mcdc2.missouri.edu/cgi-bin/browse?/pub/sasfmats/state_county.sas@. You need to include this code as a step in your SAS program to define the 2 format codes prior to attempting to open the extract dataset. You may want to edit the proc format source code if you are only planning to access data for one or just a few states.

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This file last modified Tuesday April 21, 2009, 14:43:08 Site Map    |    Rate this page/site The   Missouri Census Data Center   is a sponsored program of the Missouri State Library within the office of the Missouri Secretary of State. The MCDC has been a partner in the U.S. Census Bureau's   State Data Center  program since 1979. Questions/Comments regarding this page or this web site are strongly encouraged and can be sent to