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Understanding tidycensus options

As discussed in this lesson, Census data comprise thousands of variables available across dozens of geographies! Most of these geography-variable combinations are accessible with tidycensus; however, it helps to understand the package options.

Some data, like Census tracts, are only available by state, and users might want to subset by county; tidycensus facilitates this with state and county parameters when appropriate. Additionally, tidycensus includes the Census variable ID in the variable column; however, a user might want to supply her own variable name, which can be accomplished with a named vector.

You'll be using the Census variable B19013_001 here, which refers to median household income.

This exercise is part of the course

Analyzing US Census Data in R

View Course

Hands-on interactive exercise

Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.

# Get an ACS dataset for Census tracts in Texas by setting the state
tx_income <- get_acs(geography = "tract",
                     variables = "B19013_001",
                     ___ = "TX")

# Inspect the dataset
head(tx_income)
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