Filtering demographic data for USA using TIGER/CENSUS data

Question

I am working on Texas demographic data for a client. The ask is to collect demographic data for ZCTA areas of Texas state. I am looking for help in the source and linking demographic data for these regions.

ZCTA boundary polygons are downloaded from here.

Some information on the website on demographic details says.

The core TIGER/Line Files and Shapefiles do not include demographic data, but they do contain geographic entity codes (GEOIDs) that can be linked to the Census Bureau’s demographic data, available on data.census.gov.

This link has a staggering amount of detail. But, I am interested in only basic demographics.

As an alternative, I thought, I have found what I needed at https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER_DP/2018ACS/

This is in Geodatabase format and has required ZCTA polygons and demographic details as Tables. Is there any advice to get basic statistics like population,pop_density, sex, age, employment, ethnicity, etc

Answer 1

I personally use social explorer to quickly find metadata about ACS. In general, when working with ACS data, you want to:

• Find the relevant tables you want to work with. You can find a list of tables for ACS 2018 5 Year estimates here: https://www.socialexplorer.com/data/ACS2018_5yr/metadata/?ds=ACS18_5yr
• You can click into each table to see the variables that table contains. For example, for B01001 https://www.socialexplorer.com/data/ACS2018_5yr/metadata/?ds=ACS18_5yr&table=B01001
  • B01001001 is the total population, B01001002 is the total male population etc.
• In your screenshot, you have both the estimate values and the margin of error values (they are distinguished by the e and the m in the column names). You can see full descriptions using the census API too. See an example in this URL (you can adjust the table name B01001 to look at other tables): https://api.census.gov/data/2018/acs/acs5/groups/B01001.json