ACS Data Users Group

Hello everyone

I need help finding households in the US with children under 18 divided by demographics (age, gender, region, income, education level). I looked in the US Census website but I'm only able to find households with children 18 nationwide, not by demographics. Is there a different US Census site that would hold that information?

Thank you!

Hi Sofia -

There are a couple of options. First you can search for the topic, and then winnow to tables that include the phrase "presence of children." Or you can search the other way--search for tables with "presence of children" and then sort through those by topic of interest. Here's a link to the list of tables I found: https://data.census.gov/cedsci/all?q=&text=presence%20of%20children

And last, but not least, you can find quite a lot of data on households and families with children on sites like https://www.kidsdata.org/topic and https://datacenter.kidscount.org/.

Hope that helps!

Hi Beth, do you have any advice on how to "winnow to tables that include the phrase X"? I tried this but wasn't sure how to do it successfully. With the current database format, is there a way to search for phrases other than typing the phrase into the search bar?

Hi Anna Carlson! There are a couple of ways to approach this.

For tricks on how to search, if you ask 10 people you'll get 10 different answers on their strategy. My best suggestion is to start with Census Bureau recorded trainings like this one: https://www.census.gov/library/video/2022/getting-started-with-your-search-on-data-census-gov.html

One of those tricks is that many of us use the "table shell" list and search that to find the table number, then type the table number into the search bar. You can find the list here: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/technical-documentation/table-shells.html

All of that said...

Based on your other post--looking for race by ethnicity--you may need to use the Public Use Microdata. For that you either need a statistical tool or can go to a website like IPUMS to do online tabulations.

More info about using PUMS: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/microdata.html

More info about using the IPUMS online tool: https://usa.ipums.org/usa/

I hope this is helpful!

Hi Sofia,

You may want to check the ACS education tabulation(ACS-ED) https://nces.ed.gov/programs/edge/Demographic/ACS, a custom tab collaboration between the NCES EDGE program and the Census Bureau (https://nces.ed.gov/programs/edge/). The ACS-ED provides the standard ACS Profiles tables for unique iterations of school-age children (and households with children). Most of the estimates are at the school district level to address education-oriented audiences, but it's a great resource for anyone interested in the social/economic conditions of school-age children. The ACS-ED Maps tool also provides the data in geographic context. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/maped/ACSMaps/. - d.