The 2010 decennial census results are slowly being released by the Census Bureau, and you may have seen news reports since last December about redistricting and demographic data, provided on a state-by-state basis. However, one of the more important releases of interest to business and other organizations looking for demographic data, will occur over the summer months of 2011, from June to August, of what's referred to as Summary File 1 or SF-1.
SF-1 is also issued state-by-state, but will include data all the way down to the smallest geographies of block and census tract. (For a review of Census Bureau geography types, please see our blog article Census Geography - It's not Quite What You Learned in School.) What data will SF-1 include? Since the 2010 Census did not include a long-form version and covered only ten questions, the results are somewhat limited, to the following areas:
- Population counts for 63 race categories and Hispanic or Latino
- Population counts for many detailed race and Hispanic or Latino categories, and American Indian and Alaska Native tribes
- Selected population and housing characteristics, such as household and family information by age, size, and type
Attached for your reference is an Excel file listing all the data fields of SF-1: Census 2010 Summary File 1 Fields.xls (946.00 kb)
Other socioeconomic data, covering areas such as income, educational attainment, school enrollment, and occupation, are now collected with the American Community Survey, or ACS. The ACS is performed annually by the US Census Bureau and results can be combined over a several year period to obtain statistically significant data for smaller census geographies. The CDXZipStream ACS Premium version currently provides ACS data for states, counties, cities, and Core Based Statistical Areas for the years 2005-2009. Zip code data, for both the 2010 decennial census and the ACS, will not be available until 2012-2013.
Assuming SF-1 is released by August, we expect to have portions of this data available in CDXZipStream by our regularly scheduled data update at the end of September 2011. The following fields will be covered by CDXZipStream, and we are now soliciting input from our clients to determine if there are any other fields of interests we should add, either to the standard product or a customized version:
Please contact us at support@CDXTech.com if you would like to provide input to the CDXZipStream data feed for Census 2010 data. If you are interested in your own customized database of Census 2010 data, you can contact customsolutions@CDXTech.com for a free quote.