A quick guide to what's new with the 2020 ACS data
Censtats is happy to announce the launch of the data sets for the American Community Survey’s 5-year estimates for 2020! This has been months in the making (with some delays from COVID-related issues) and now the latest information from the Census is available for purchase.
We want to take a moment to cover some of the more notable changes you may find in the files for 2020. These range from language adjustments to file consolidation to changes to the “Overview” in the .xlsx file. Many of these changes were decided by the ACS while some of these were made by us, and while there aren't that many overall this is still as good a time as ever to look over them.
LANGUAGE
Many of the changes to language can be chalked up as “minor” but when dealing with extensive amounts of data like the Census, it can be helpful to be specific. For starters, all categories for “2019 inflation-adjusted dollars” have been updated to reflect 2020 adjustments.
For Geographic Mobility, the categories are a bit different this time around. Not only is the language different, but there is a change in how counties are counted.
Now you have four categories:
CONSOLIDATION
In Censtats 2019, you might have encountered a file called “Selected Social Characteristics.” We decided to fold the content of that data table into Households & Families in order to have more confined categorization, so if you need data from Selected Social Characteristics, you'll want to look here.
OVERVIEW
The Overview in the xlsx is more or less the same with some tweaks that come with the above changes. One other note is Age & Sex - in 2019, it was based in increments of 10 (Ages 10-20, 20-30, etc.), but to stay consistent with how the ACS categorizes it, we changed it to be in increments of five (Ages 10-14, 15-19, etc.)
...And that should do it for the notable changes you might find in the our 2020 tables. Again, not that many changes from 2019, but if you still have any questions, feel free to reach out - we’d be more than happy to help!
Header image sourced with permission from Narupon Promvichai.
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