Age by Race/Hispanic Origin by Sex by Year Report Generator

Help Page

What it Can Do

This application can provide you with a printed report or a comma-separated-value format file with information about the estimated population of counties and higher-level county aggregate geographic areas anywhere in the United States. These estimates are for the years 1990 through 1997. You get to specify which years you want. You also get to pick lots of other details about how the data will be aggregated and presented. Age, race, hispanic origin, and sex are some of the other key population stratefiers that are available. You get to choose the degree of detail in which you are interested. Output can be delivered back to your browser or can be sent directly to an anonymous FTP site/file that you specify.

How it Works

The underlying database is quite detailed, but the application lets you specify the precise degree of detail you want for your output. Each of the select menus allows you to determine one aspect of the coverage and detail that will appear in the generated file/report. Specifically, you get to choose:

When making your choices off the menus keep in mind that, unless otherwise instructed, each of the menus allow you to make multiple selections. So you can (for example) choose two races, three years, five states, etc. Most of the menus have default choices, so if you forget to make a selection for one, you will not be prompted to enter a choice -- you will just get the default.

Choose the geographic units (levels) for which you would like to see data.

Here you can choose whether you want data summarized at the county level, the state level, metro area level, etc. You can choose at most two levels. Note:It is advisable to avoid combining county level with higher level (anything but state) in the same run. It will cause the application to run slowly (because it has to access different data sources and will not do so as efficiently as when such requests are run separately.)

Metro/non-metro portion detail

This option only applies to summaries at the state level and above. The summary for the non-metro portion of a state (for example) is derived by summing data for all the counties in that state which are located within a metropolitan area. Important note: For the purposes of these data, the definition of metropolitan in New England is based on whether a county is in or not in a NECMA. The usual definition refers to MSA/CMSA's rather than NECMA's, so New England counties can be partly metro and partly non-metro. Thus the data for the New England US Division (1), the six states within that Division, and also for the US Totals are not precisely the same as the usual definition of the term.

This option has special meaning when you choose county as the only Geographic level. In that case, you can use the Metro or Non-Metro selections to indicate that you want to select only those counties that are in or not in metro areas. For example, you can select counties as the Geographic units, New York as the Geographic Universe, and "Metro Portion totals" as the Metro/Non-Metro detail option. This will result in a report/file with all counties in the state of New York which are within a metropolitan area.

Select the geographic universe

In the first geographic menu you specified what units or summary levels you were interested in. This menu lets you specify where those units are located. Typically, you will be choosing one or more states, or possibly one or more metro areas. You cannot specify which metro areas you want to use as your universe here, but you can specify that you want to do so -- and then select the specific ones on the following metro area select menu. You can specify both states and metro areas as universes, in which case they will be intersected. For example, if you chose Illinois on this menu and also specified you wanted to use metro areas as a universe qualifier and then chose the St. Louis MSA on the following menu you would be getting just the Illinois part of the St. Louis MSA (which, if you omitted the state selection, would get you county summaries in Missouri as well.)
Choosing "Entire U.S." makes any other choice irrelevant -- it says you want data for all the specified summary units. If you choose it and anything else it will result in an error message and no output.

Specify one or more metropolitan areas (as defined on 7/1/97) .

This selection menu can be used in two ways. If you choose the option off the previous menu that says "Use metro areas as universes", then selecting specific metro areas off this menu says that you only want to see data for these metro areas and/or for the counties that comprise them. Otherwise, if you choose either "Complete Metro Areas ..." or "Metro Areas within states" off the "Geographic Units" menu, then you can use this menu to specify which specific metro areas you want data for. The default in this case (if you do not select any specific metro areas) is that you get summaries for all such metro areas in the specified universe.

Metro areas are defined by OMB and are reviewed annually. Counties can be added or deleted each year, and metro areas can be created or dissolved each year. For this application we are using the definitions of the metro areas that were in effect for the year beginning July 1, 1997 (changes always go into effect on July 1 of a year.) Because we are using county-level data to create these aggregates and because the usual metro areas (MSA's, CMSA's and PMSA's) do not follow county boundaries in the 6-state New England area, we use NECMA's (New England County Metro Areas) only for that part of of the country. For more information on how metro areas are defined see the entry in our Master Area Geographic Glossary of Terms page (with links to the Census Bureau's page with the latest specific definitions.)

Age Detail

There are 3 levels of detail for age, ranging from NO detail (just total pop) to most detailed (19 5-year cohorts), with an intermediate choice of getting just five broad categories by collapsing the 19. Note that the 0-17 and 18-34 categories have been further "estimated" by the application; the Census Bureau numbers are by 5-year cohorts, so to get a number for the 0-17 cohort the application (prior to Oct. 29, 1999 -see below) adds the 0-4, 5-9 and 10-14 cohorts plus 60% of the 15-19 cohort, under the assumption that ages are evenly distributed within the cohort. The logic of the program was altered circa Oct. 29, 1999 so that this allocation of the 15-19 cohort was done based on the the percentages for the state (for each year and gender). Follow the link (next to "Age Detail" on the application page) to see a more detailed explanation.     Also note that you can make multiple choices here -- in fact, the default is to have both total and the five broad categories returned. If you do a "ctrl-click" on the remaining choice then you will get all 1 + 5 + 19 different counts. If you want Totals and the 5-year interval detail only, turn off the "Collapse into.." choice by ctrl-clicking it and then ctrl-click the "Complete 5-year.." option.

When you view your output the age detail you select here will be reflected in the variables (fields) of your report or file (unlike all the other dimensions you specify, which are represented by the absence/presence of additional rows or records with summaries for the selected categories.)

Race/Hispanic

Often a source of great confusion with users. For the purposes of these estimates the standard five race categories familiar to users of the decennial summary files (the four used here plus an "Other Race" category) have been replaced with the "modified race" categories. The "Other" category has been distributed among the other four here.

The hispanic category causes the most confusion. The essential fact to keep in mind is that the Bureau classifies hispanic origin separate from race. A person can be both African American and hispanic, or white and hispanic. The only categories available from this application are the total hispanic population (regardless of race) and a breakdown of the white population into the hispanic and non-hispanic subcategories. The other races cannot be cross-classified by hispanic origin (via this application).

Sex

Specify the gender detail you would like to see. You may not care to see the estimates broken down by sex - the default selection gives you just totals without regard to gender. But you can choose to have counts for males and/or females in addition to or instead of the across-gender totals. Or you can choose Totals and Males and do the subtraction yourself.

Years

These estimates are as of July 1 for each year on the menu. You can specify all the years, just one (the default), or any combination you wish (except none).

Sort Variable Menus

The 6 "Sort Var i" menus allow you to specify the sort order of your output. Not all the options show, so you may need to scroll down to see the variable you want. Be careful not to try to sort on a variable that would not otherwise be kept on your output. (For example, if you do not choose any race detail on the Race/Hispanic menu then do NOT attempt to sort by Race since the application will not keep that variable on the dataset to be sorted.) The entries "(None)" can be used if you first select a variable and then change your mind. The menus initially have no variable selected (and it is perfectly all right to leave them all that way -- your output will still be sorted but we don't promise you what the order will be.) When generating a printed report and specifying n sort variables, the report will print values for the first n-1 variables only when their values change. For example, if your specify state, county, race, year as your four sort variables, in the report the values of state, county and race will only print on lines where they have values different from the previous line (in standard data processing lingo these would be referred to as "break variables".) The variable year would then appear as the 4th column of the report and its value would print on every line.

Select output format

If you want something to read, that looks nice and is relatively well labeled, then you want to specify the (default) Report Format option here. But if you want to take the numbers generated and load them into a database or spreadsheet application for further analysis or local custom formatting then you should select the Comma-delimited option. The variable names will be written to the first row of this file to serve as identifiers.

Optional Report Titles

If you want to override the default titles printed on the top of each page of the report you can enter your own here. Avoid using the "%" character since it causes the application to fail. This option is ignored if a comma-delimited file was requested rather than a report.

Linesize and Pagesize

Another report-format-only pair of options. The report lines are normally (by default) up to 150 characters across and there are 90 lines on a "page" (i.e. before we print footnotes and repeat the titles and column headings -- it is somewhat tricky to get these electronic page images to actually print to a physical page. But if you'd like to try to make them fit, you have the option of specifying your own page dimensions here.) Using a smaller linesize may cause the report to "wrap" lines -- meaning it will require multiple lines in the report to display all the variables for one observation. This can make the report difficult to read.

Strictly Optional FTP Site Parms

This is an experiment and it may prove to be not very useful. But we've had a few people request that they would like to avoid the bother of having to take their output and save it to a local disk (where they do their web browsing) and then sometimes have to transfer it to yet another computer site where they intend to actually process the file. So if you are at a site that permits public (i.e. "anonymous") FTP write access to a directory and you know about FTP site addresses and directories, then you can be one of those rare users that actually cares about these options. The value entered for Site addr is the same value you would type following "ftp" to connect to that site. Similarly, the value for Directory is the same value you would use in a "cd directory-name" command once you were connected to that site. And File name is the name of the actual file that will be written within that directory at that FTP site. If you specify the first 2 of these parms and leave this one blank, the application will assign a default filename of agersex.lst (if you requested a report format), or of agersex.csv if the requested a comma-delimited file. If you enter anything in this box, that will be the complete filename; the application will not attempt to add any default filetype suffix.

Don't forget to hit the Run Request button when you have made all your selections and are ready to run the report. Note that after you review your results you should be able to use your browser's Back button to return to this page. At that point your previous selections will still be in effect and you can easily run the request again after making changes. To start over with all default values you can click on the Reset Defaults button.

That's about it for now. Hopefully, we'll get around to doing more extensive examples. But go ahead and try a few combinations. Hopefully, you'll find that generating these reports is really pretty easy. It's trying to comprehend and make sense of the results that can be the real challenge.
Please report any problems encountered and/or suggestions for future enhancements and general comments to the author, whose e-mail address appears at the bottom of the pages.

Comments/Suggestions Topic Search Help!!!

The Missouri State Census Data Center Program is sponsored by the Missouri Secretary of State, Missouri State Library .

University of Missouri John Blodgett, john@oseda.missouri.edu
Office of Social and Economic Data Analysis

/uic/uicapps/agersex.help.html Rev. 12NOV98, jgb