Abstract
Many survey datasets have relatively high levels of error. The American Community Survey (ACS) data disseminated by the U.S. Census Bureau offer critical socio-demographic data of the U.S. and include a margin of error to indicate the reliability of an estimate for each census unit. Such feature-based reliability data should be incorporated when using ACS data in GIS such that users are informed of the data quality. This paper provides a brief review of the ACS data. Challenges to the use of ACS data quality information in GIS are discussed. The paper briefly reviews a set of mapping tools packaged as an ArcGIS extension to tackle some challenges in incorporating the data quality information in ACS data. These mapping functions can also be used to handle other survey spatial datasets with reliability information. The extension provides a foundation to build additional GIS tools to handle and analyze survey data.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
References
Allen, J. P., and E. Turner, E., 1997, The Ethnic Quilt: Population Diversity in Southern California (Northridge, CA: Center for Geographical Studies).
Buttenfield, B.P., 1993, Representing Data Quality, Cartographica, 30(2), 1–7.
Brewer, C. A., and L. Pickle, 2002, Evaluation of Methods for Classifying Epidemiological Data on Choropleth Maps in Series, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 92(4), 662–81.
Brewer, C. A., and T. A. Suchan, 2001, Mapping Census 2000: The Geography of U.S. Diversity (Redlands, CA: ESRI Press).
Citro, C. F., and G. Kalton (Eds), 2007, Using the American Community Survey: Benefits and Challenges (Washington, DC, USA: The National Academies Press).
Devillers, R., Y. Bédard, and R. Jeansoulin, 2005, Multidimensional Management of Geospatial Data Quality Information for its Dynamic Use within GIS, Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing, 71, 205–15.
Gan, E. and W. Shi, 2002, Error Metadata Management System. In Shi, W., P. F. Fisher, and M. F. Goodchild (Eds.), Spatial Data Quality (London: Taylor and Francis), 251–66.
Gates, G. J., 2006, Same-Sex Couples and the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual Population: New Estimates from the American Community Survey, The Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy, UCLA School of Law, April 25, 2011, http://www.law.ucla.edu/williamsinstitute/publicati ons/SameSexCouplesandGLBpopACS.pdf.
Hough, G.C., and D. W. Swanson, 2006, An Evaluation of the American Community Survey: Results from the Oregon Test Site, Population Research and Policy Review, 25, 257–73.
MacDonald, H., 2006, The American Community Survey: Warmer (More Current), but Fuzzier (Less Precise) than the Decennial Census, Journal of the American Planning Association. American Planning Association, 72(4), 491–503.
MacEachren, A.M., C. A. Brewer, and L. W. Pickle, 1998, Visualizing Georeferenced Data: Representing Reliability of Health Statistics, Environment & Planning A, 30, 1547–61.
MacEachren, A.M., A. Robinson, S. Hopper, S. Gardner, R. Murray, M. Gahegan, and E. Hetzler, 2005, Visualizing Geospatial Information Uncertainty: What We Know and What We Need to Know. Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 32(3), 139–60.
Openshaw, S., 1989, Learning to Live With Errors in Spatial Databases. In: Goodchild, M. F. and S. Gopal (Eds.), Accuracy of Spatial Databases, (London: Taylor and Francis), 263–276.
Peters, A. and H. MacDonald, 2004, Unlocking the Census with GIS (Redland, CA, USA: ESRI Press).
Pickle, L.W., M. Mungiole, G. K. Jones, and A. A. White, 1996, Atlas of United State Mortality, (Hyattsville, MD, USA: National Center for Health Statistics).
Qiu, J. and G. J. Hunter, 2002, A GIS with the Capacity for Managing Data Quality Information. In Shi, W., P. F. Fisher, and M. F. Goodchild (Eds.), Spatial Data Quality (London: Taylor and Francis), 230–250.
Sun, M., and D. W. S. Wong, 2010, Incorporating Data Quality Information in Mapping the American Community Survey Data. Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 37(4), 285–300.
Thomson, E. F., B. Yu, A. Nuru-Jeter, J. M. Guralnik, and M. Minkler, 2009, Basic ADL Disability and Functional Limitation Rates Among Older Americans From 2000–2005: The End of The Decline? The Journals of Gerontology. Series A, Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences, 64A(12), 1333–6.
Turner, E., and J. P. Allen, 1991, An Atlas of Population Patterns in Metropolitan Los Angeles County 1990. (Northridge, CA, USA: Center for Geographical Studies).
U.S. Census Bureau (USCB), 2008, A Compass for Understanding and Using American Community Survey Data: What General Data Users Need to Know (Washington, DC, USA: U.S. Government Printing Office). (http://www.census.gov/acs/www/Downloads/handbooksACSGeneralHandbook.pdf).
U.S. Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC), 1998, Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata (Washington, DC, USA: Federal Geographic Data Committee) FGDC-STD-001-1998.
Wong, D. W. S. and C. V. Wu, 1996, Spatial Metadata and GIS for Decision Support. Proceedings, 29th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) Volume 3: Collaboration Systems and Technology. http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/HICSS.1996.493251.
Xiao, N., and K. Hawley, 2010, Mapping the Census: An Introduction. Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 37(3), 167–168.
Zandbergen, P. A., 2008, Positional Accuracy of Spatial Data: Non-Normal Distributions and A Critique of the National Standard for Spatial Data Accuracy, Transactions in GIS, 12(1), 103–130.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
About this article
Cite this article
Wong, D.W., Sun, M. Handling Data Quality Information of Survey Data in GIS: A Case of Using the American Community Survey Data. Spatial demogr. 1, 3–16 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03354884
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03354884