ACI Technical Report: Initial Measures Derived from Census

Abstract

The decennial census provides a wealth of information about communities that has been mined by social scientist for decades. The purpose of this technical report is to describe an initial set of measures taken from or derived from the 2000 U.S. Census in an effort to develop a statistical description of Anchorage communities for use with the Anchorage Community Indicators project of the University of Alaska Anchorage Justice Center. The initial set of measures isolated from census are inspired by two principal bodies of work: (1) the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, an exceptionally well endowed research effort that took neighborhood measurement very seriously; and, (2) Peter Blau’s work that specifies parameter of social structure, heterogeneity, and inequality. The focus of the paper is on documenting how the measures were formed from 2000 Summary File 3 census tables. However, measures without conceptual content are of little value. Accordingly, the paper will offer a brief introduction to the derivative works (PHDCN, Blau) and then follow with a fairly detailed presentation of each measure (what concept is addressed, how it is measured, how the measure is distributed across block group and census tracts, and isolation of the census tables providing essential counts).