Look at areas near you that have had lowest response rates in the past. This map allows you to find communities or neighborhoods where you could focus your reporting. The underlying data can be downloaded from here. We have also compiled county-level participation rates from 2000 and 2010 in one downloadable file here. Some examples of recent reporting in on this are here and here and here.
You can find numbers on undercounts (who gets missed, who gets counted twice and the net) for each state and places or counties with 100,000+ people from the 2010 census. Heads-up: Looks for “Summaries of estimate of coverage for states, places and counties” and use pull-down menu to pick your state. Warning, they are PDFs! (You’ll also see this was released in May 2012, which means we’ll see the 2020 version of this in 2022)
How an undercount in your community might affect programs like SNAP, WIC and Section 8. See story from Obed Manuel at the Dallas Morning News for inspriation. He used data from this study on how federal funding has been distributed in the past . This study provides breakdowns by state, including a spreadsheet showing the amounts distributed to each state from 55 large Census-guided federal expenditure programs in FY2016.The spreadsheet can be downloaded here.
Where should storm-displaced people be counted? Pew did this story recently.
The first batch of data (the redistricting file) will come in about February-March 2021. It will contain race and ethnicity breakdowns for the population as a whole, and then separately for the voting age population. There is also one table showing how many housing units are vacant or occupied. Here’s the prototype and this documentation from 2010 is also useful.
Here are some ideas you could start preparing for, particularly by compiling the analysis for previous decade(s) to have at the ready for when the new data becomes available.
Segregation: You can look at segregation in your city or metro area, using the dissimilarity index. You can find info on that here and here. You’ll want to look at multiple measures of segregation, including white-black, white-Hispanic, white-Asian, etc. You can get some great inspiration and find historical research in work by sociologist John Logan at Brown University.
Look at how the diversity index has changed in your city or metro. The diversity index measures the chance that any two people are from different groups. You can get some inspriation from the “Changing Face of America” project by USA Today in 2014:interactive map; Story 1; Story 2; Story 3; and here’s a local takeout from the diversity analysis.. Also, here’s the methodology with directions for how to calculate the diversity index yourself and a great video USA Today compiled to explain the diversity index to the average reader.
Sprawl: What share of a city or metro’s population lies within its core (however you want to define that core)? There’s been a lot of talk recently about millenials not wanting to live in the cheap houses in the exurbs, which may be a driving force for curbing sprawl.
Vacancy rates: The first batch of data will have a simple breakdown of how many housing units are vacant or occupied. This might be especially interesting to compare to 2010 when the recession was still hammering most places. You could use the latest American Community Survey or Multiple Listing Service (MLS) data to show prices.
Areas with biggest population gains/losses compared to the 2010 Census. Especially interesting areas to pay attention to are urban downtowns, rural areas, the outer fringes of metro areas. But don’t forget about the mid-sized cities outside metro areas because you might find some surprises. Warning: small places will be hard to measure because of the new differential privacy application.
Did any of the places that had been losing population (as of the 2010 Census), turn it around?
Majority-minority areas. Certainly there were will be cities or counties around you that might have crossed this threshold in the past decade.
Diversity of youth compared to adults. Since the redistricting file will have a separate racial breakdown for the 18 and over population, you could subtract this from the total population to generate racial breakdown of the under age 18 population. In most places you will likely see a stark difference in the diversity of youth compared to adults. You can then see how this is playing out in schools, child care centers, summer camps and other places that are geared toward kids.
Does “prison gerrymandering” happen in your state? Read more about prison gerrymandering here. Also, The Prison Policy Initiative has a project on prison gerrymandering. The Census Bureau will release a breakdown of types of group quarters at block level in the first big wave of data used by legislatures. (That will be published state by state in February and March of 2021.) This will be a first. That way, states can subtract prison populations from any place they like and use their own records on inmates’ previous residence to move them elsewhere.
New on this Census, respondents identifying as black or African American will have the opportunity to identify their origin (i.e. Somali, Ethiopian, Haitian, etc.). Since there isn’t prior data on this, the primary way to use it will to identify which subgroups are living in your communities, and identifying where there are dense pockets of them living will help point you to where you should be knocking on doors for interviews.
Lots of opportunities to look at household relationships: multigenerational families, grandparents raising their grandkids, same-sex married or unmarried couples, etc.
Aging. What places have the highest median age? (indicating high density of elderly) Are they struggling to provide enough services to the elderly? Or to find working-age people to take the jobs needed, especially those to support the elderly? There should also be age breakdowns for each racial group and Hispanic/Latino that will allow you to see trends within those specific groups, as well.