1. Congratulations!
Congratulations on making it to the end of this course! The Census and ACS are rich data products that can be used across a wide range of disciplines. Let's review what we've learned.
2. Census Data Products
You learned about two important Census products: the Decennial Census of Population and Housing, and the American Community Survey. The Census is a full count of population undertaken every 10 years, while the ACS is a survey conducted annually. The Census covers core demographic topics: sex, age, race, Hispanic origin, and family structure. The ACS covers a wide variety of additional topics.
The ACS produces estimates based on 1-year and 5-year averages, and these estimates have associated Margins of Error. Margins of Error will be larger for the 1-year estimates, and for smaller geographies. Census tracts, an important geography for social science research, are only available as a 5-year average.
3. Census Topics
These are some of the topics that we covered in this course. We just scratched the surface of what's available. Additional topics include Disability Status, Veteran Status, and others. Providing a complete list now is not important. You've seen how to find topic documentation on Census and other websites. Your exploration will be guided by your specific research and business needs.
4. pandas
You made extensive use of pandas, a crucial tool in the Python data science universe, including methods such as groupby and merge. You learned how to use pivot and melt to shift between "tidy" and "wide" data storage. You can go deeper into working with pandas in these DataCamp courses.
5. seaborn
You used a wide variety of seaborn plots for exploratory visualization. seaborn is covered at greater depth in these courses.
6. geopandas
You got a taste of geopandas, and saw the value of putting spatial data on a map. Look for these courses to go further into the growing field of geospatial data science.
7. Have fun exploring the Census!
Thanks for taking this tour with me. I hope you will continue to explore, on your own and with other Census researchers.