Obtaining United States Census Data

The United States Census Bureau collects a tremendous amount of data. Much of this data is now available over the World Wide Web and it is available both in a format that is easy for humans to read and in a format that is easily used by spreadsheets and other software. In this module we will see how some of this data can be obtained over the Web and analyzed on your own workstation.

The United States Census Bureau's home page can be reached by clicking the hot link below. You should visit this home page sometime and use it as a starting point to explore the online resources provided by the Bureau. For this module we will go directly to the data.

Click on the button below to open a second browser window and go to a page at the Census Bureau's Web site designed to extract data from the 1990 United States Census. When the window is open arrange your two browser windows so that they partially overlap and you can easily move back-and-forth between the two. This window will guide you through the steps used to extract data in the other window.

The Census Bureau continues to refer to some of their data collections as "tapes" -- a remnant of the days, not so long ago, when this data was really maintained on tapes. The most important "tapes" for our purposes are the summary tapes. Find the hot link STF3C - part 1 in your U. S. Census Bureau window. Then click on that link. It leads to a screen that offers several options. As an example we will construct a table allowing us to make some comparisons between different states. The data that we want is state level data. Click the button labeled Go to level state and then click the Submit button.

This should take you to a page that says Current Level: State and offers you several options. We will extract data to make some comparisons among several different states. The option retrieve the areas you've selected below is the option we want. If that is selected great -- if not, select it.

You should also see a scrollable list of states a little further down on this page. Select five states -- your choice. Select your first choice by clicking on the state's name. For subsequent choices --

If you are using a Macintosh, click on each state's name while holding the command key down.
If you are using a Windows computer, click on each state's name while holding the Ctrl key down.

After you've made your choices, click the Submit button.

The next page gives you several data retrieval options. Select Choose TABLES to retrieve data (population, race breakdowns, etc.) Then click the Submit button.

The next page offers a rather large menu of tables. Each table gives you one or more pieces of information about each state you've selected. For example, table P1 gives you one piece of information -- persons -- for each selected state and table P7 gives two pieces of information for each state. Eventually you may want to explore the data available and extract data in which you are interested. For now, select tables P1 and P7 by clicking on the boxes at the left edge of the screen. Notice when you click on a box it is checked. Next click the Submit button.

We're almost there. The next screen gives you several data retrieval options. We will use two different options. First, we want to look at the data we've selected. Select the option HTML format (easy to read) and then click the Submit button.

The next screen contains the data that you requested in a fairly readable format. If you have a printer, print this data out so that you can refer to it later.

Next click your browser's back button to return to the preceding page, the one that offered data retrieval options.

This time select Tab-delimited format and then click the Submit button.

The next screen conatins the same data you examined a moment ago. It is in a form that can be easily used by a spreadsheet or another program even though it is not human-friendly. Look at the print-out you made above and compare the human-friendly output with this output to see what the various numbers on this output represent.

Now go to your browser's file menu and choose Save as. You will get the usual dialog box asking you to name the file and choose where it should be placed. Do so. Now you can close your other window.

Once you've saved the file you can open it in a spreadsheet or other data analysis program or word-processing program and use that program to analyze the data.