ACS Data Users Group

Does anyone know of a resource to find the start dates for one-year and five-year ACS tables? For example, S1502 had its first year with one- and five-year data in 2015, B01001 in 2010. S2801 had its first with one-year data in 2015, and 5-year data in 2017.

I'm looking for a way to find those dates for arbitrary tables in bulk without having to pull them up one at a time in data.census.gov.

Thanks -

Jon

I don't know of a resource that would provide exactly what you're looking for (that'd be nice!), but an option that would be more efficient for this than data.census.gov is the API for IPUMS NHGIS. You could use that get metadata for all of the one- & five-year detailed tables and then determine when any table came into existence programmatically. We provide R & Python libraries that facilitate IPUMS API queries (ipumsr and ipumspy) along with documentation and guides.

Caveats: we include only the detailed tables in NHGIS, so this wouldn't help with the S tables, and we don't have 1-year data from before 2010.

FWIW, I put in a help request to census.data@census.gov, and got back a reply from acso.users.support@census.gov. I was informed that the data products specialists "thought this was a really great idea" and that it was passed along to the developers.

I'm not sue what you mean by "start date." Do you mean the "data collection cycle" and "data cut" dates ? There is technical documentation somewhere that gives the data collection "waves" during the year. I think that there are 3 or 4 of them. The household is selected from the Master Address File (MAP) that has the location on every structure in the US that has people in it (household). The household is selected and then the "head of household" (person 1 on the form) fills out the form for everyone in the household. The data collection starts with a mailing (post card ?) that invites someone in the household to go online and fill out the survey, if they don't do this right away they get a 2nd mailing (or maybe a phone call. At some point if they haven't answered they get a home visit.

Here is the title of the documentation:

American Community Survey and Puerto Rico
Community Survey Design and Methodology

https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/methodology/design-and-methodology.html

Hope this helps,

Dave Dorer

Now that I look back at your question, I misinterpreted your question.You can use the API to download all the datasets that are available via the API. The R function listCensusApis(name = NULL, vintage = NULL) in the censusapi package will download a dataset with all the api url information the includes the vintage (year) and period. The R function uses a json call. Also there is probably a link on a Census webpage that will download the dataset as a spreadsheet (cvs file).

I'll see if I can find it. I use the database all the time.

Dave Dorer

The database is available in html json and xml formats. Here is the link to the html

https://api.census.gov/data.html

The mail web page is:

https://www.census.gov/data/developers/updates/new-discovery-tool.html

You will need a package/program to read the database in one of the above format. As noted earlier the R censusapi package has a function that can download the database as an R "data.frame." you can the save it in a tab delimited file and read it into Excel.

Dave

Thank you, Dave!

What I find in those tables is text like this:

I'm hoping to find data showing individual tables and the period they were first issued, e.g., B28012 first has five-year data in 2020 and one-year data in 2021.

Any thoughts?

Dear Jon,

What I do is use is the R package censusapi. For the ACS vintage and period and table type (B,S,DP,C etc) you can download the metadata for each combination using the R function:

listCensusMetadata(name=name,vintage=vintage,type="variables")

Use the R function that downloads all the apis - see earlier reply - to get the relevant vintage and period then "loop" over all the combinations.

If you work for a non-profit (501(c)(3)) or government entity, I can probably find time to make up a data base for you with each table "group" the starting a ending vintage with 1 row in the spreadsheet for all the ACS tables that existed from 2010 to the latest vintage.

Sorry that I wasn't careful when I read your original post.

info@dorerfoundation.org

Dave

I am testing a feature for my Census reports that takes any table and pulls data from 2010 to the present all measures all years (ACS1 or ACS5) it includes the measure names and if the measure name is diff from prior year the text is in red. You can pull US, State, County, or tract. It takes about 45 seconds. I think it will be helpful and hope to update the server this weekend.

Its now on the server under Table History ( https://tomlaheyh.github.io/Census-ACS-5-data/ )