Finding Vital Statistics Data on Name and Ethnicity for Texas

September 29, 2010 9:37 AM

Some researchers (pdf) have been able to acquire large state-level of databases from the state's Vital Statistics of every person's first name and race. I am having trouble navigating these websites though, and am not sure who to ask. I am interested in getting a list of all first names and race/ethnicity and gender of babies born in Texas for 1990 and 2000. If it's possible to get the data already in a spreadsheet, where name is a column, gender a column, race a column, and year a column, even better.
posted by scunning to Science & Nature (2 answers total)

It would help if you could post links to the sites in question, so we could get a sense of the form of the current data.

Your options likely boil down to the following:

1) State posts the information online in a website that you have to navigate through all the data manually.
2) State posts the raw data files in a form close to what you want
3) State will provide the raw data files if a FOIA request is filed.

You hope for #2, it's usually #1 or #3.

If it's #3, good luck. If it's #1, it's usually a matter of crawling the state website and extracting the relevant data. I work in this industry (crawling/extracting/processing of specific sets of web data), the costs involved can be minimal or extensive, depending on the complexity of the task.
posted by swngnmonk at 10:18 AM on September 29, 2010

> I am having trouble navigating these websites

Which websites?
posted by AmbroseChapel at 1:46 PM on September 29, 2010