The Census Bureau released the five-year, 2016-2020 American Community Survey tables
today. The r-package TIDYCENSUS worked without a hitch this morning.
In case folks are interested in using TIDYCENSUS to examine the three sets of
non-overlapping periods: 2006-2010, 2011-2015 and 2016-2020, I’ve updated my R script for
all states, counties, places and the US. This is just for the means of transportation to
work, plus a few key demographic variables.
https://gist.github.com/chuckpurvis <https://gist.github.com/chuckpurvis>
Important to note is that the 2016-2020 ACS is based on 2020 Census geography. The older
datasets are based on 2010 Census geography. This isn’t a big deal if your geographic
areas haven’t changed, 2010 to 2020, but I’d be careful when comparing older (pre-2020) to
newest (2016-2020) data, especially for smaller geographies such as tracts, block groups
and places.
My next step would be to do some count checks of geographies included in Census 2020 PL
94-171 vs the 2016-2020 ACS. Check to make sure that the geographies (block groups,
tracts, places, counties) match between the Decennial 2020 and ACS 2016-2020.
And to reiterate, there is no single year ACS data for 2020. Those tables are using the
“experimental weights” and are only published at the nation and state level.
Happy St Patrick’s Day to all!
Chuck Purvis,
Hayward, California