How to Search for Census Data from R

By Ari Lamstein

In my course Learn to Map Census Data in R I provide people with a handful of interesting demographics to analyze. This is convenient for teaching, but people often want to search for other demographic statistics. To address that, today I will work through an example of starting with a simple demographic question and using R to answer it.

Here is my question: I used to live in Japan, and to this day I still enjoy practicing Japanese with native speakers. If I wanted to move from San Francisco to a part of the country that has more Japanese people, where should I move?

Step 1: Find the Table for the Data

Data in the census bureau is stored in tables. One way to find the table for a particular metric is to use the function ?acs.lookup from the acs package. (Note that to run this code you will need to get and install a census API key; I explain how to do that here).

> library(acs)
> acs.lookup(keyword = "Japanese", endyear = 2013)

An object of class "acs.lookup"

endyear= 2013  ; span= 5 
results:

  variable.code table.number                                                                    table.name                                   variable.name

1    B02006_009       B02006     ...read more
Source:: r-bloggers.com