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As an applied demography group located within a research university, we are always looking for ways to share what we learn with the public and highlight work that takes place within our domain. Today, we're kicking off a series of interviews with interesting people from all across North Carolina who frequently use demographic data in their work. If you'd like to nominate someone (or yourself) for this series, please reach out to demography@unc.edu - this…
Ed note: Though we cover a range of demographic topics, we hold a special spot in our hearts for our annual report on NC's state vegetable, the humble sweet potato. Previous coverage:2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2015, 2014. Happy Thanksgiving! The year of 2020 has been an especially challenging year for the fresh vegetable industry due to the the historic wildfires over the West Coast; the August storms in the Northern Midwest, and Hurricane Laura’s affect…
Today we are launching a new tool with myFutureNC to help you visualize educational indicators at the county-level. The County Explorer map tool provides a bird's eye view of county performance and uses data from the 2020 County Profiles. To use the County Explorer tool, select an indicator from the drop-down menu in the left sidebar. Information about the county will be displayed in the right side bar, along with a link to the corresponding…
In October, the U.S. Census Bureau released a report detailing why it planned to release the results of the 2020 American Community Survey (ACS) 1-year estimates in an experimental format. The ACS is the only annually updated source of detailed social, demographic, and economic information for all communities in the United States. In addition, the Bureau announced in November that it would delay the release of the 5-Year ACS estimates that had been planned for…
Picture this: You’re at a demography dinner party. (Let’s pretend we can have dinner parties again.) And the demography enthusiast next to you says, “Hey! Got a question for you. Which county in North Carolina is most like the state?” How would you answer? First, you’d want to know what parameters to include – e.g. what factors to consider in thinking through how to calculate your answer. To do that, we can start with an…
Dr. Michael Cline is the state demographer for North Carolina at the Office of State Budget and Management and has given us permission to re-post his content here. Each year, he publishes population estimates and projections for North Carolina and its counties. In 1990 President George H. W. Bush signed into law a joint resolution designating November as the first National American Indian Heritage Month. That year’s U.S. Census identified 1.96 million people classified as…
28 million kids are now eligible to receive their Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines now that the shots are approved for 5 to 11-year-olds, according to the AP. We wanted to see how many kids in NC fall in this age group and determine where they live. Using the 2021 single age population projection data from the North Carolina Office of State Budget and Management (OSBM), we calculated the number of individuals aged 5 through 11 by county…
Redistricting may be foreign to many citizens, but it plays an important role in the outcome of elections and the legislature that has an effect on our everyday lives. Redistricting is when state legislatures look at the state map and redraw the lines for congressional districts. These districts determine who will be elected for those districts and what type of representation the citizens living in those districts will be receiving over the course of their…
This piece will be updated throughout the week as more questions come in. If you have a question about redistricting (or are a journalist writing a piece) please email demography@unc.edu and we'll do our best to answer your question. We have been receiving a lot of questions concerning redistricting and the upcoming release of the redrawn maps in North Carolina. We’ve talked about redistricting a lot, including what it is, why it’s complicated, and what…
Our recently published guide on Opportunity Youth explains why we replaced the Disconnected Youth indicator on the MyFutureNC state dashboard with the Opportunity Youth indicator and expanded the ages we were studying for this indicator from 16 to 19-year-olds to 16 to 24-year-olds. We always try to provide data at both the state and county levels. However, one of the challenges in transitioning to the Opportunity Youth indicator is the lack of data at the…
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