Specific demographics/employment by US census region

October 9, 2024 10:41 AM

I want to figure out the percent of non hispanic whites working in blue collar fields as percent of the population and non hispanic whites in certain areas. Is this possible in any census tool? Which one? If so, what is the degree of granularity (i.e County, tract etc?)
posted by sandmanwv to Society & Culture (5 answers total)

I work in an IT role in a research institute that does this work, so I only know enough to give you some places to start. You should be able to get these down to some pretty small geographies depending on what data product you use. The American Community Survey would be where I'd start, maybe with the latest 5 year.

Two sites where you can select some fields and get aggregate data back from are our own nhgis.org and the US Census Bureau's data.census.gov. In both cases, you need to select what fields you want returned summarized by what geography and you'll be able to download a very large file with that data.
posted by advicepig at 11:17 AM on October 9

I would suggest looking at the Pew Research Center large reports on Latinos & requesting data that led to findings in these reports. Large report linked.
posted by dog-eared paperback at 11:34 AM on October 9

My apologies; once I took a second look at your question I realized my answer is not pertinent to your question.
posted by dog-eared paperback at 11:52 AM on October 9

It matters how we're defining "blue collar." The Census categories for "industry" are     

Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting, and mining
    Construction
    Manufacturing
    Wholesale trade
    Retail trade
    Transportation and warehousing, and utilities
    Information
    Finance and insurance, and real estate and rental and leasing
    Professional, scientific, and management, and administrative and waste management services
    Educational services, and health care and social assistance
    Arts, entertainment, and recreation, and accommodation and food services
    Other services, except public administration
    Public administration

The Census categories for "job class" are

"Private for-profit wage and salary workers,"
"Private not-for-profit wage and salary workers,"
"Self-employed in own incorporated business workers,"
"Own not incorporated business workers."
"Government workers"
"Self-employed in own not incorporated business workers"
"Unpaid family workers"

Then there are 509 specific categories and 23 major occupational groups for "occupation," which are detailed here.

So I was going to tell you that it's probably just a matter of figuring out occupations or occupational groups you want to search for.

BUT

As far as I can find out, the US Census doesn't collect this data at all.

They do collect occupation by sex, but I can't find a table for occupation by race or ethnicity. The Annual Business Survey collects "Statistics for Employer Firms by Industry, Sex, Ethnicity, Race, and Veteran Status for the U.S., States, and Metro Areas," but I don't think that's what you're looking for because a lot of people in blue-collar industries aren't necessarily in blue-collar jobs (e.g. a middle manager in an auto parts factory).

I could be wrong. Hopefully someone will come along and correct me!
posted by Jeanne at 12:01 PM on October 9

B24010A , Sex by Occupation for the Civilian Employed Population 16 Years and Over (White Alone)

The Census has a habit of not having a crosstab with all racial/ethnic categories but having separate subtables for them

Seems to only be available as ACS 1-year, and Census sez that means you can only get it for geographies with more than 65000 people. Checking it, low population counties are just blank.

If you're not familiar with Census data, you typically get your choice of which annoying thing you're going to be dealing with.

You can just pull the table and do spreadsheet jiggery-pokery and get the percent of anglos employed in each occupation for counties with more than 65000 people, but you'll have no data at all for counties with lower populations.

Or, if you want something more geographically consistent, you can go to the PUMS, public use microdata sample, and aggregate it up from there. PUMS go down to PUMAs, or public use microdata areas. IIRC, pumas are supersets of tracts that together have at least 100,000 people. BUT, also IIRC pumas can cross municipal boundaries.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 6:23 PM on October 9