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Valorie Hanni Rice
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Next March we will all see a familiar sight in our mailboxes – a Census questionnaire. The Census is a count of everyone living in the United States and is mandated by the U.S. Constitution. A census has been done every ten years since 1790 making the 2010 Census the 23rd time a complete count of all the inhabitants of the United States and its territories has been undertaken. Over the years, the number and type of questions asked have varied, as well as how it is administered. The 2010 Census questionnaire will be one of the shortest ever, consisting of only ten questions.
Census data are used to reapportion Congressional seats to states, distribute more than $400 billion in federal funds to local, state and tribal governments each year and make decisions about what community services to provide. In 2000 and other recent censuses, most households received a short questionnaire while a sample of households received a longer form that asked for detailed socio-demographic information such as income, educational attainment, and housing characteristics in addition to the typical age, gender and race questions found on the shorter form. These were called the “long form” and provided crucial demographic information about communities important to state and local entities for planning resources and for distributing federal funds. The data would become less and less relevant by the later part of each decade. In response to the increasing need for more timely and relevant data, an ongoing survey called the American Community Survey (ACS) was put in place to provide important socio-demographic data on an annual basis. The ACS was designed to essentially replace the Census long form.
American Community Survey
The American Community Survey (ACS) provides demographic, economic and housing characteristics of the U.S on an annual basis. The survey became nation-wide in 2005, though it had been conducted in select test areas of the country since 1996 (Pima County being one of those areas). It is an ongoing survey that is sent to a portion of households every month. Addresses are selected at random and any one address should not receive the survey more than once every five years. Like the decennial census, participation in the American Community Survey is required by law and all responses are confidential. Because it is an ongoing survey, data users must remember that they are looking at period estimates rather than one point in time as with the decennial census (so the data may not always be comparable). ACS is to be used to look at characteristics of the population and not as an official count of the population – the decennial census and annual population estimates fill that role.
Data are collected continuously throughout the year, but released on an annual basis for one-year, three-year or five-year sampling periods. Results are available for areas with a population of 65,000 or more based on one-year estimates. Communities with 20,000 or more have data available based on three-year estimates beginning with 2005-2007 data (released December 2008). In Arizona, we currently have three-year estimates for every county except Greenlee as well as 39 cities and towns. Five-year estimates will be available in 2010 for all geographies, including down to Census tract and block group areas.
Acs 2008 Results
The 2008 one-year estimates were released September 21st. These data show that in Arizona 83.8% of the population earned a high school diploma (or equivalent), the median household income was $50,958, the average time it took to get to work was 25 minutes (about 75% of us drove alone), 18.6% lived in a different house than what they had the year before and there were 37,991 households in the state (roughly 2% of all households) in which the grandparents were responsible for grandchildren under the age of 18 living with them. There were three new topics added to the 2008 survey – healthcare, marital history and VA service-connected disability rating. ACS data for the state shows that 23.4% of individuals age 18-64 do not have health insurance coverage while 2.2% of those over 65 are without, the median duration of current marriages in Arizona is 18.1 years (U.S. average being 18.4 years) and there are 551,053 civilian veterans age 18 and over in the state, 15% of which report a service-connected disability rating.
The data also allows us to compare ourselves to other states as well as over time. Arizona ranked high in mobility, coming in 6th in the percent of people who lived in a different house then the year previous (18.6 percent). The top five states with people that tended to move are Alaska (22.3), Nevada (20.3), Idaho (19.2), Oklahoma (19.2) and Colorado (19.1), while those that tended to stay put reside in Rhode Island (12.1), Connecticut (11.9), New York (10.5) and New Jersey (9.9). When looking at the percent of housing units that are mobile homes, Arizona ranks 12th with 10.7 percent. South Carolina comes in first with 17.9% followed by New Mexico with 16.4%. As one might suspect, the state with the smallest percentage of mobile homes is Hawaii with virtually none. Arizona was one of five states whose median income showed a decline from 2007 to 2008. We went from $51,726 in 2007 to $50,958 in 2008. The other four states with a decline were California, Florida, Indiana and Michigan while Kansas, Louisiana, New Jersey, New York and Texas saw an increase in their real median household income over that time period. 
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FOR FURTHER INFORMATION
American Community Survey data is available at the Census Bureau’s American FactFinder website (http://factfinder.census.gov), as are the 2000 Census results and many other demographic and economic data.
Information on the American Community Survey can be found at: http://www.census.gov/acs/www/
Information on the 2010 Census can be found at: http://2010.census.gov/2010census/
A description of census history is at http://www.census.gov/population/www/censusdata/hiscendata/html
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