My name is Sandra, and I'm a sociologist/demographer in upstate New York. Those who know me know that I'm an unrepentant data geek (or as my friend Tracey prefers, "data whore" - a term I wear with pride). Apparently crunching numbers for my day job just isn't enough to give me my fix these days, because now I can't stop when I come home.
I spend much of my working days playing with the American Community Survey (ACS), which is carried out by the U.S. Bureau of the Census. Once upon a time the Census Bureau had a "long form" that went to a lucky 1 out of 20 U.S. households in every census year (once a decade). The "long form" census data was invaluable to social scientists because of the depth of information on such a large sample of American households. The downside was that it was available only every ten years. Since 2005, the Census Bureau has been phasing in the ACS as an annual survey that includes all the questions of the "long form". The downside is that the annual ACS has a smaller sample size than the decennial "long form" data (although still HUGE by statistical standards!). The upside is that it's annual!!! How cool is that?!?! The last "long form" data collection was done in the 2000 U.S. census. By 2010, the "long form" had been completely replaced by the ACS.
In my day job, I use the ACS for studying the demographics of health workers. But now that I know the data set so well, I'm constantly coming up withe questions in my personal life (reading the news, talking to friends, thinking about social issues) that I just want to sneak into the data and get quick answers for. Then it occurred to me... maybe other people are interested in some of these answers, too!
Thus, I decided to launch a blog that will shine a weekly "spotlight" on a particular group of Americans - where they live, what they do, what their families look like, etc. The possibilities are endless! I don't really expect everybody to read the blog weekly (and if you do, you're probably sick like me, lol), but I'm hoping that people researching a particular topic will stumble onto relevant posts and find information that they wouldn't necessarily find elsewhere. I do ask, however, that if you pull data from my website you give it the proper citation.
That's it for now! Look for the first American Community Spotlight later this week :D
Sandra
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