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What's New at MCDC in 2008
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2008
January || February || March
March 2008
2007 County Level Population Estimates
The Census Bureau has released county level estimates of the population of states and counties for the years 2000 to 2007. These estimates show not only the population estimates but also the components of population change -- births, deaths and net migration -- for each of the years. The Missouri Census Data Center has added these data to our public archive and has created several standard data products similar to what we have been doing with these updated estimates for each of the last several years. Specifically:
- The curmoests.xls Excel spreadsheet file has been updated. There are 4 worksheets within this file and only 1 has been updated - Counties 2007 . These data are for Missouri only and show the revised estimates for the state and each county for each year since the 2000 census. The other 3 worksheets contain data at sub-county levels and these will not be updated until the 2007 sub-county estimates are released (usually in late June or early July).
- The county data have been aggregated to create summaries at the metropolitan and micropolitan statistical area level for the entire United States. We have also aggregated the data to a number of county-based regions for the state of Missouri only. To view reports based upon these data go to our
Population Estimates Reports page and note the revised entries in rows 3 thru 5. Notice that the left column contains a description/hyperlink to the report, while the right column contains the name of the archive data set used to generate the report and doubles as a hyperlink that will take you to the Dexter data extraction utility with that dataset selected for extracting.
February 2008
In Case You Hadn't Noticed
We have made some changes to the two standard navigational boxes that appear on this and many other MCDC web pages. Users
should note the prestigious top position within our Quick Links box is now occupied by a link to our ACS Profile Reports application. This reflects the importance of this application as a primary resource for accessing the American Community
Survey data as released by the Census Bureau. Expect this application to continue to evolve (as it has been doing over the last several months in case you have not tried it lately.) More changes are underway as we write this, involving the addition of graphics (charts and maps).
The applinks utility application, accessible from the Applinks Master Menu link (in the Navy blue navigation box) or from the Missouri County Data Map (Quick Links item), has been revised so that a link to the ACS Profiles links appears first (although the report is still not available for areas of less than 65,000 population). We have also grouped all the 2000 census links and moved them to the bottom of the menu page in
order to give more prominence to applications that feature more current data.
State Estimates for 2007 Show Little Change in Missouri
The Census Bureau has released the first set of population estimates for 2007. These are at the state and nation level only
(no counties) and have estimates regarding the components of change in population since the 2000 census. The data show that
Missouri had an estimated population of 5,878,415 as of July 1 of last year. This represents an increase of 281,732 persons (5.0%) since the 2000 census, with net migration accounting for about 40% of the growth and natural increase the other 60%. Missouri now (2007) ranks as the 18th largest state in terms of population (from 17th at the time
of the 2000 census). It also ranks 18th in terms of absolute population growth since 2000, but only 27th in percentage increase. Over the most recent 1-year period (2006-2007) the Bureau estimates that the state had a net population gain of 40,776 or .7% (that's less than 1%; 7/10ths of 1%, to be precise). For those
who follow these numbers carefully you will note that the 2006 estimate for the state was 5,849,369 as originally published last year. However, when the Bureau issues these estimates they also revise estimates for earlier years and the revised 2006 estimate for Missouri is 5,837,639 (a decline of 11,730 from the original estimate). So that increase of 40,776 is based on the lower revised
estimate. The new estimate is only 29,049 higher than last year's original figure.
See a report showing key data items in our population estimates reports directory. This report shows data for all states and includes a second version of the report showing how each of the data
items ranks among the states. The raw data file can be accessed in the MCDC's popests data directory (/pub/data/popests) in either csv format (for Excel users) or as a
SAS dataset via uexplore/Dexter (for those familiar with Dexter).
Comparable data at the state and county level is due to be released by the Bureau in late March, with place (city) level numbers in late June (without the components-of-change detail).
Changes to MCDC Personnel
There have been a number of changes to key positions within the Missouri Census Data Center lead and core agencies in recent months:
- In October Lindsay McCarroll resigned from her coordinator position at the Missouri State Library. The library is currently advertising to fill this position. Barbara Reading is once again serving as the interim coordinator of the MCDC program.
- In September Matt Hesser was hired by the Missouri Office of Administration as the the new State Demographer. Matt takes
over the position that was held for many years by Ryan Burson prior to his resignation at the end of 2006. The
State Demographer is designated as a coordinating agency within the MCDC program.
- In August Evelyn Cleveland retired from her position with OSEDA. Evelyn had been with OSEDA for nearly 30 years and was part of the Data Center since its inception in 1979. She was responsible for many aspects of this web site. Among other duties, she was the person primarily responsible for maintaining this home page.
- Also in August OSEDA (at the University of Missouri in Columbia) hired Billy Earney as a programmer/analyst to essentially take over Evelyn's position. Billy came
to Columbia from the Rolla campus of the University, from which he had graduated and where he had taught and served as a research
programmer/analyst for over 10 years. Billy has assumed a major role in developing and maintaining the MCDC web site, especially many of
the dynamic web applications such as the new ACS profiles.
January 2008
New Key Indicators for Missouri from 2006 American Community Survey
Continuing in the MCDC tradition of taking large collections of complex data and trying to create much smaller collections of much simpler data, the MCDC has created a preliminary version of a Key Indicators dataset. We have taken the information in our ACS profiles datasets (see the Whatsnew page for last November if you missed the announcement of that new data resource) and further boiled it down to just under 20 key variables. We have focused on the state of Missouri for this prototype and on the Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMA) geographic areas as the summary units. Why PUMA's? Because there are data available for all of them and they cover the entire state. Except for Congressional Districts they are the only sub-state units that have such complete coverage. And because of this, it makes sense to do statewide maps to display the items. We are still working on preparing the maps that will be a critical part of working with these data, but we do have a prototype of the data ready for public access.
The data are available in the MCDC data archive within the acs2006 data directory. From here you can either access the SAS dataset version (key_indicators.sas7bdat) via Dexter or the Excel spreadsheet version, key_indicators.xls (in either case by clicking on the filename/link). We have done some customizing of the data in the Excel spreadsheet. For one thing, we have transposed the data so that variables correspond to rows and geographic areas (PUMAs) are in the columns. (Actually, there are 2 sheets within this databook and the default one is the one we are describing here; but there is also a second sheet named "data" that is a straight translation of the SAS dataset as created via Dexter).
The variables that we are defining as the key indicators (which are the ones for which we are going to produce maps and charts) are the ones highlighted in the spreadsheet. The other rows (variables) are related items; in many/most cases they are numerator or
denominator items used in calculating the indicators.
The decisions regarding what data items are most useful as key indicators are not final. We very much welcome user feedback with respect to what data items they would like to see in these datasets. Once we have settled on the indicator data content, we plan to create more such datasets based on other geographic universes and units (such as United States as the universe and states as the units). We could (and probably will) do something at the county level, but there are not that many counties for which ACS data are available thus far.
Users not familiar with the PUMA geography should look carefully at the mopumas.pdf
document (linked to within the acs2006 data directory) which indicates the counties that comprise each PUMA in Missouri. We shall also
be creating a statewide PUMA base map to complement the pdf-format map booklet created by the Census Bureau (and linked to from the mopumas.pdf document).
Other New Data
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