ACS Data Biography - Important things to include?

We’re in the process of getting together some data biographies for some of the data sources we use a lot on our website, and we’re starting with the American Community Survey. It looks like Communities Count in King County has done one (Tailored Training).

  1. Does anyone know of other ACS data biographies we could potentially cite?
  2. Our community has a lot of concern about Census undercounts. Does anyone know how undercounts in the Deccenial Census impact the weighting of the ACS? (e.g. If people without documentation are undercounted in the Census, are they also underrepresented in the ACS, even after weighting?)
  3. I’m not familiar with the entropy weighting that was used for the 2020 ACS PUMS release. Is there anything important that we should share with members of our community about how that may have affected how representative the data is? (besides discouraging people from comparing across years)

Thanks for any help or ideas you can contribute!

Hey @eplees thank you so much for posting about this and for working on data biographies. I am not aware of any ACS data biographies other than the King County one:

https://www.communitiescount.org/data-biographies

but I do know that lots of people are working them! If you want to get a little more insight into the specifics of the King County process they joined us for a recent Talking Data Equity and the video is here:

I do not know about the effect of undercounts in the Decennial Census and weighting nor the impact of entropy weighting on that. However, now that you’ve raised it, I’m very interested and will look into it. I’m going to see if we can find an expert on that to join us at Talking Data Equity.

If you have any new insights since posting this, please definitely add an update here and tag me! :star2:

Sorry about my slow reply - I’m just catching up :blue_heart:

Thank you so much! I really appreciate it!

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Hi! I’d like to incorporate a data biography for some of the data we make available on our website, and we use a lot of ACS data as well. I’d be curious to know how this project is going for you! Would love to touch base or see any products, if possible.

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Hi there @kbaker I’m so excited to hear you’re working on a data biography for your data too! You can see the updated products that King County is working on here, and your post is a great nudge for me to reach out and see if Sara Jaye and team might come back to a follow-up session of Talking Data Equity.

I am reaching out now and will keep you up to date! :crossed_fingers:t4:

Awesome! I’ll keep an eye out.

We’ve had to push back on this project a little bit schedule-wise. I’ll definitely post once we’re done!

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