SOC 123 Comparing Locales Across Multiple Levels of Scale Project

ASSIGNMENT

This exercise is intended to give you a brief introduction to public data; to compare locales across multiple levels of scale; and to think critically about differences between places in terms of racial formation.

1.  Go to the US Census websitehttp://www.census.gov/quickfacts

2.  Use QuickFacts to identify the racial and ethnic composition of the United States, your state, your county, and local area to fill in the table attached.  If you are not from the United States, choose an address. You can use this address, 591 Tremont St, Boston, MA, 02118  (For a list of geographical levels see the file attached from the Geographical Areas Reference Manual at the Census.) You will discover that QuickFacts will not provide information for geographies lower than @5000 people. Interestingly, voting boundaries are often smaller – closer to the scale of a Census tract. QuickFacts does not provide data at the level of census tracts, although these data are available in a more technical format. Consider why that might be.

(Extra credit: Search the census website to see if you can identify your census tract number associated with your neighborhood and write it on your homework ). 

3. Write a few sentences that describes what you see in the table. How similar or different is your local area/neighborhood from its surrounding county or the closest big city? How does it compare to your state and the nation at large? Finally, be sure to explain how the race question is different than the ethnicity question at the Census.