Working with Census Data to Evaluate Hot Spots of Young Professionals in Wake County, NC

Problem:

The goal of this project is to determine if there are hot spot areas of young professionals (Ages 25-29 years) in Wake County, North Carolina. This would give information to a variety of marketing agents (i.e. housing, happy hours, etc).

Analysis Procedure:

ArcMap was used for this analysis. Tools included Hot Spot Analysis (Getis-Ord Gi*).Data used was obtained via the United States Census Bureau: American Fact Finder - Profile of General Population and Housing Characteristics: 2010 2010 Census Summary File 1 TIGER/Line Shapefiles – Census Tract 2010 Wake County, North Carolina.

The assignment consisted of two parts. Before any maps or analysis, data was downloaded from the United States Census Bureau. The American Fact Finder website was used to find General Population and Housing Characteristics from 2010 and TIGER/Line Shapefiles was used to get the census tracts for Wake County. These layers were added to ArcMap and the general population data was joined to the census tract shapefile. A thematic map was then created showing the distribution of 25 to 29 year-olds (Original Field - HD01_S007). Finally, a Hot Spot Analysis was performed to show clustering of 25 to 29 year-olds.
Process Diagram showing the flow of the Analysis Procedure

Results:

  • Census Distribution
  • Hot Spot Analysis
Click to Enlarge Maps

Application and Reflection:

The assignment has taught me ways to obtain census data for the entire county. The wide range of data allows a variety of possible projects from this data set. Something I would like to explore would be an income-based analysis for the entire country. This could give insight about cities/areas that have higher incomes. Further analysis could then be explored within those areas to explore specific neighborhoods with high incomes. In order to do this I would need and income based census file from the AFF and a census tract for the entire nation. This would be a large dataset and would probably take a long time to compute. Another approach would be comparing a few states that I would like to live in. In this case I would need AFF income data and census tract data on state basis.