Introduction: The goal of this lab was to learn how to download and use data from the US Census Bureau in a GIS system.
Methods: The first step was to download the desired data from the US Census Bureau website. I had to search for the desired data on the website, download and unzip it. This included downloading the geographical data as well. I then imported the data from Microsoft Excel into a data table in ArcGIS. In order for the data to be represented geographically, I joined the downloaded geographic data and the data table imported from Excel. Then I simply symbolized the map quantitatively using the natural breaks method. This was done with the total population per county data downloaded from the US Census Bureau. I then proceeded to repeat these steps with data on housing, which already contained the percentage of renter occupied housing units per county.
Results: As can be seen from the maps, there is a correlation between total population and the percentage of housing units being occupied by renters. As the population increases so too does the percentage of housing units occupied by renters. In Southwest Wisconsin there is a high concentration of population as well as a high concentration of renter percentage. Overall, the correlation appears rather strong with just a few northern counties having high rental percentages but low population. This correlation may be attributed to areas of higher population being more crowded and not having as many full households and more apartments, which are typically rented out more. Also, many of the high population areas are also homes to colleges whose students typically rent housing instead of buying it. Though this isn't shown in this particular map, but in future maps I could go back and gather data of college and university locations to place on the map as well.
Sources:
U.S. Census Bureau. (n.d.). American FactFinder. Retrieved from http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/searchresults.xhtml?refresh=t
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