Using the American Community Survey: Median Household Income by MSA

MONDAY, JUN 24, 2024

Are you curious how to unlock the potential of the American Community Survey for your organization, agency, or business? Read on in this series to learn how to use Social Explorer’s unique, customizable tools to create a table that shows the metropolitan statistical areas with the highest median household incomes in real time.

We’ll start on Social Explorer’s landing page:

On the left side, we’ll click on the “Tables” button underneath the “Create new” button. That takes us to the table screen.

Next, we’ll click on “American Community Surveys (5-Year Estimates) to get some options. Pro tip: The five-year estimates are generally more accurate than the 1-Year Estimates shown below since they include a far larger sample size.

We’ll click on “Begin Report.”

We’ll start by using the pull-down menu (which defaults to “Nation”) to get to the Metropolitan Statistical Area. Another Census Bureau quirk: There are two MSA categories. One, with a 320 code in the menu – which we don’t want – shows MSAs within a state. The other, which has a 310 code in the menu, shows MSAs, regardless of state boundaries. We can see there are plenty of choices, but here, we’ll select all MSAs by clicking on the green “Add” button below the pull-down menu:

When we do that, we can see the category will appear in the box below it, “Current Geography Sections.”

Next, we’ll click the green button, “Proceed to Tables.”

We can see there’s another pull-down menu below the “Select a dataset” heading. There are two options here. Social Explorer has pulled together some of the most common tables and made them easier to use in many cases. This option is the default. The second option, for more fine-grained analysis, includes the raw ACS numbers. You can use the pull-down menu to change the view:

When you do, you’ll see the table list change somewhat:

There’s no right or wrong here; the Social Explorer tables can be easier to use, especially for people who don’t work with Census data every day. Social Explorer also makes it easier for occasional Census users to find tables. Directly above the pull-down menu are three tabs – “List Tables,” “Search by Keyword,” and “Premade Reports.” Make sure “Social Explorer Tables” have been selected from the pull-down menu and click on the “Search by Keyword” tab.

We can type “median household income” into the search box, then click on the green “Search” button:

There are any number of ways that the ACS lets you slice and dice household income numbers, but for now, we’ll go with the simplest measure, shown first among the various options. We’ll highlight it and then click on the “Add” button below the results:

Once we’ve checked to make sure that the table moved into the bottom box, we’ll click on the green “Show results” button:

Since we’re working with 940 metro and micro areas, we probably don’t want to have to just sift through almost 200 pages. The easiest solution is to download the mapping data into a basic spreadsheet. Here, we’ll go to the “Data Download” tab above the results:

Another pro tip: If you’re not used to working with ACS data every day, it’s highly recommended that you check the second “Output options” box to display column labels in the first row. Once you’ve done that, you’ll click on the green hyperlink below the options box to download your data:

When you click the green hyperlink, your data will download. You can retrieve it from your computer’s default download location and open it as a spreadsheet. Another pro tip: Use the “Do Not Convert” option in Excel. This prevents codes from being truncated, and the codes can come in handy if you plan to use the data with another database:

Finally, check to make sure that all the data was imported correctly. I usually delete the second row, since those are codes, as well as any blank columns. A final spreadsheet might look like this:

Since it’s a spreadsheet, you can now sort, filter, add formulas (i.e., to account for inflation), and use your mapping tool data for whatever is needed. Enjoy!

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