As a number of you work through your accreditation applications, you might also be reviewing your strategic planning documents. Today’s post is about the
Narrative Profile from the Census Bureau’s
American Community Survey. As you gather information about your community, this simple yet powerful tool might help you with your planning. The Narrative Profile covers 15 different topic areas; users can start their search by zooming in on a map or by using dropdown menus (Step 1). For today’s illustration, a library community was chosen at random, the
Lied Imperial Public Library, or the Imperial, Nebraska community.
Here is how you get your Narrative Profile: After choosing “Dropdown Menus” from Step 1, you then select a geography level from step 2. In this case, Imperial is a “Place”, so we select Place and then Nebraska > Imperial city, Nebraska from Step 3. There are other options besides place, including geography levels such as county, Census Tract, Zip Code, or Metropolitan/Micropolitan Statistical Area (Metropolitan=core urban area of 50,000 or more population; Micrpolitan=core urban area of 10,000 or more population, but less than 50,000). After the place of Imperial is selected, there is a link at the bottom that says “Get Profile”. Clicking on this spits out a report that you could either print, save, or copy and paste parts of it, including the many charts and graphs that it contains. The data covers 2009-2013.
The report contains data from various topical areas. For starters, if we look at household data there are 900 households in Imperial, of which 52% are married couple families. There are 30.8% persons that live alone and 17.2% are other families or nonfamily households. 14% of the population in Imperial spoke a language different than English at home, and 94.2% of that 14% spoke Spanish. The education data is expressed in a pie chart that was generated in the Narrative Profile, located at the top of this post (click on the chart to expand and actuall read it).
There are many additional categories, including data tables and illustrations such as the one above. Some of these are employment status and type of employer, industries (retail trade is the highest at 26.7%), occupations, commuting to work (81.1% drive alone and 9.8% walked), income (women,
unfortunately make about $14,000 less than men in Imperial), poverty rate (12% overall), health insurance (16% do not have insurance), population age distribution, and housing characteristics.
While the Narrative Profile certainly isn’t as comprehensive as the reports you can build from the Advanced Search section on
American FactFinder, for a quick snapshot of your community it’s a good starting point. And it has the extra benefit of producing some nice basic charts and graphs that you are free to copy and paste. The Dude likes not only reliability, but simplicity. Shaka.
As a number of you work through your accreditation applications, you might also be reviewing your strategic planning documents. Today’s post is about the Narrative Profile from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. As you gather information about your community, this simple yet powerful tool might help you with your planning. The Narrative Profile covers 15 different topic areas; users can start their search by zooming in on a map or by using dropdown menus (Step 1). For today’s illustration, a library community was chosen at random, the Lied Imperial Public Library, or the Imperial, Nebraska community.
Here is how you get your Narrative Profile: After choosing “Dropdown Menus” from Step 1, you then select a geography level from step 2. In this case, Imperial is a “Place”, so we select Place and then Nebraska > Imperial city, Nebraska from Step 3. There are other options besides place, including geography levels such as county, Census Tract, Zip Code, or Metropolitan/Micropolitan Statistical Area (Metropolitan=core urban area of 50,000 or more population; Micrpolitan=core urban area of 10,000 or more population, but less than 50,000). After the place of Imperial is selected, there is a link at the bottom that says “Get Profile”. Clicking on this spits out a report that you could either print, save, or copy and paste parts of it, including the many charts and graphs that it contains. The data covers 2009-2013.
The report contains data from various topical areas. For starters, if we look at household data there are 900 households in Imperial, of which 52% are married couple families. There are 30.8% persons that live alone and 17.2% are other families or nonfamily households. 14% of the population in Imperial spoke a language different than English at home, and 94.2% of that 14% spoke Spanish. The education data is expressed in a pie chart that was generated in the Narrative Profile, located at the top of this post (click on the chart to expand and actuall read it).
There are many additional categories, including data tables and illustrations such as the one above. Some of these are employment status and type of employer, industries (retail trade is the highest at 26.7%), occupations, commuting to work (81.1% drive alone and 9.8% walked), income (women, unfortunately make about $14,000 less than men in Imperial), poverty rate (12% overall), health insurance (16% do not have insurance), population age distribution, and housing characteristics.
While the Narrative Profile certainly isn’t as comprehensive as the reports you can build from the Advanced Search section on American FactFinder, for a quick snapshot of your community it’s a good starting point. And it has the extra benefit of producing some nice basic charts and graphs that you are free to copy and paste. The Dude likes not only reliability, but simplicity. Shaka. 
