Demographics

Posts about U.S. Census data, housing trends and race or ethnicity.

Key topics in this category:

Recent posts

U.S. Breastfeeding Rates By Duration, Race/Ethnicity Over Time

Early this month, the Centers for Disease Control released a study analyzing breastfeeding in America, noting that the percentage of babies who were breastfed increased by four points from 2000 to 2008.

But the study showed that less than half of women were still breastfeeding after six months, the period recommended by American pediatricians. This is likely because doing so after returning to work is difficult (as my wife is experiencing now) for mothers.

Slate has more:

Breast-feeding increased across all racial groups as well, though black women still lag far behind Latinos and white women. Over 75 percent of both white and Latino infants who were born in 2008 were breast-fed, while the number of black infants breast-fed the same year was under 60 percent. Researchers checked back in with moms of 2008 babies at six and nine months, and at both points the percentage of black babies breast-feeding was much lower than the percentage of white and Latino babies.

These simple slopegraphs attempt to show the trends using the CDC’s data:

breastfeeding

 

Filed under: Demographics, baby hu-stiles, Line Chart, pregnancy

Mapping ‘Rich Blocks, Poor Blocks’

“Rich Blocks, Poor Blocks” allows users to get information about income in their neighborhoods, using the 2006-2010 American Community Survey estimates* compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau. Here’s a map of Washington, D.C., which — as I’ve noted before — is segregated by race, educational attainment and income:

Source: Rich Blocks, Small Blocks

Source: Rich Blocks, Small Blocks

* These data have high margins of error in small geographic units like Census tracts, which this service uses, so don’t take the figures literally. Still, the estimates can be useful for spotting broader trends about communities.

Thanks to the wife for sharing this discovery.

Filed under: Demographics, American Community Survey, Census, DC, Mapping

Mapping Obama’s Election Performance By County In 2012 Vs. 2008

The Washington Post over the weekend published an interesting story about President Obama’s southern support in the election:

The nation’s first black president finished more strongly in the region than any other Democratic nominee in three decades, underscoring a fresh challenge for Republicans who rely on Southern whites as their base of national support.

This map compares Obama’s performance in 2008 to this year’s election in the lower 48 states. Darker blue shades represent higher percentage point increases, and darker red shades represent decreases in percentage points. It’s clear he performed better this time in parts of the Deep South:

The Daily Viz

But why? One likely explanation for Obama’s stronger showing in the parts of the South could be that those counties have a high proportion of black voters, and Obama turned them out. According to the Post, “black voters came out in droves on Election Day and voted overwhelmingly for Obama — near or above 95 percent in most parts of the South.” Here’s a map of the black population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. See a correlation?

U.S. Census Bureau

Notice too that Obama did worse in Coal Country than he did four years ago, perhaps because the region has higher unemployment rates than the national average, or because the Romney campaign wooed voters in this region, especially in Virginia. Here’s a map of coal production, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. This is less clear, in part because the map shows all coal-producing counties, not just those in which it’s a key part of the economy now (the red and pink areas in West Virginia, Kentucky and Virginia):

USGS

And, finally, it’s no surprise that Romney did better than McCain in 2008 in Utah. Romney, of course, is a Mormon and he led the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. But if you want to compare it with the election results, here’s a map of the Mormon population, again from the U.S. Census Bureau:

U.S. Census Bureau

I’m generally not a huge fan of county-by-county election maps because counties as a unit of geography are largely meaningless in national elections. But in this case maybe it’s useful. Meanwhile, check out the Post’s nice map gallery of the 2012 electorate.

Filed under: Demographics, Policy & Politics, ArcGIS, Mapping, Obama, Romney

Charting Americans’ Turkey Consumption Per Household: 1967-2012

Americans who celebrate Thanksgiving generally enjoy a good bird, myself included. But is that the case in some years more than others?

This chart shows turkey production (254 million this year) normalized by the number of households estimated each year by the U.S. Census Bureau. In the sixties, turkeys were produced at lower per-household rates than, say, the 1990s. We’re back down to about two turkeys per household now:

Who knows why this shift occurred. Perhaps diets changed, or people purchased more food in bustling economic times, like the 1990s, or we started importing turkey from China. Any ideas?

You can gobble up the turkey data here.

Filed under: Demographics, Economy & Finance, Line Charts, thanksgiving, turkey

Charting Baby Gender, Birth Date

My wife and I had friends over last night, and we asked 20* of them to guess a few critical stats about our impending baby (among the reasons this blog hasn’t exactly been “daily” lately).

Here’s how they guessed on birth date (the official due date is Sept. 24):

They were split on gender (we’re waiting for the surprise):

The average guess on weight was 7 lbs, 7 ounces, btw.

We removed one friend’s entry because, frankly, 27 pounds is an outlier.

Filed under: Demographics, baby hu-stiles, Column Chart, donut chart

Tracking Worldwide HIV Infections

This week Washington is hosting the International AIDS Conference, and one of my colleagues crafted this interactive to show how HIV infection rates differ by country and region.

The red lines below show the percentage of the adult population infected with the disease in Middle, Eastern and Southern Africa, regions in which about eight percent of the population is infected. In some countries, though, the rate is higher than 20 percent:

Filed under: Demographics, AIDS, Flot, Line Charts, NPR

Monitoring D.C.’s Growth With Landsat

Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the Landsat system, a group of satellites that offer scientists a continuous view of the earth.

“The data from the satellites provide a permanent, objective record of land conditions and are routinely used to measure and monitor changes brought on by natural or anthropological events and actions,” according to the U.S. Geological Survey, which operates the system in partnership with NASA.

Here’s an example. Four decades ago, the system took this color infrared image of the Washington, D.C., area. “The red tones represent forests and large grassy areas. The light tones indicate cleared fields and the highly reflective impervious areas of urban development,” according to USGS:

Landsat also captured this image earlier in 2012. “A comparison of the two images illustrates the significant growth in the greater D.C. area,” the agency said:

More about the Landsat system here:

Filed under: Demographics, satellite, usgs, Washington DC

Charting Unmarried Households And The Effect On Kids’ Future Income

The New York Times has a fascinating story today about links between marriage and children and the growing class divide in America. The story focuses on two families — one led by a married couple, Chris and Kevin Faulkner; the other by a struggling single mom, Jessica Schairer:

The economic storms of recent years have raised concerns about growing inequality and questions about a core national faith, that even Americans of humble backgrounds have a good chance of getting ahead. Most of the discussion has focused on labor market forces like falling blue-collar wages and lavish Wall Street pay.

But striking changes in family structure have also broadened income gaps and posed new barriers to upward mobility. College-educated Americans like the Faulkners are increasingly likely to marry one another, compounding their growing advantages in pay. Less-educated women like Ms. Schairer, who left college without finishing her degree, are growing less likely to marry at all, raising children on pinched paychecks that come in ones, not twos.

The story is accompanied by two charts illustrating the trend. The first shows how the rate of women having children outside of marriage has increased among all racial groups:

This chart shows that children who don’t live with both parents are less likely to move up to higher income groups as adults:

Filed under: Demographics, Economy & Finance, income, marriage, The New York Times

How Common Is Your Birthday? Pt. 2.

Last weekend’s birthday heatmap post has been hugely popular by The Daily Viz standards, drawing in more than 100,000 readers and tons of social media attention. While I’m excited about the traffic, I’m also worried that the graphic may have misled some readers.

Some people read the map assuming that darker shades represented higher numbers of actual births, even though I tried to explain in the post that the colors were shaded by birthday rank, from 1 to 366, in popularity. Or I thought I did. Because of that, Sept. 16 — the most popular birthday — seems wildly more common than January 1, among the least popular. Both may be relatively close in the raw number of births, even though their ranks are far apart.

Unfortunately, I haven’t yet been able to acquire a list of all dates and total births for each. But last night I compiled a decade’s worth of nationwide birth data by month. Those data show that August, in fact, saw the most births during the 10-year period. Each month is over 3.1 million births, however:

August, of course, has an extra day for potential births, so I created an average births by month field. Viewed that way, September did have more births relative to its size. But notice there isn’t much difference between months in the distribution of the births. Alas, all our birthdays are probably pretty normal:

I should note that this blog is a place for me to experiment with visualization techniques in my own time, and I will occasionally make bad design choices or produce work that is less useful to some. This is one of those times, I suppose. Thanks to Dan DeFelippi, Waldo Jaquith and several others who prompted this post. Download the data if you want to create your own visualizations.

Data source: Centers for Disease Control, National Vital Statistics Reports

Filed under: Demographics, birthday, column charts, corrections