American FactFinder results

I was able to use American FactFinder to learn some useful demographic facts about the target audience for my library website (i.e., the residents of Norman, OK):
-They are substantially better-educated than the national average
-Only about 7,000 of a population of about 111,000 are born outside the U.S. (about 6%), so any linguistic minority communities are likely to be small
-The median age of a Norman resident is 29.9, which is pretty young--the median age in the U.S. as a whole is about 37

In some ways, this tells us a lot: we want to tailor our website to younger, fairly educated, English-speaking people. However, this search also demonstrates the limits of relying on statistical information without having a qualitative context. Norman, OK contains the main branch of the University of Oklahoma, which has about 30,000 students. These students skew the demographics reported in the census data from American FactFinder, but I don't really want to include them in my planning for my public library website, because they will likely be using the OU university library system and will not be using the public library. If I didn't know this information, I might over-tailor my site to people who were younger and more educated than the site's true audience.

I did not learn too much from this search that was broadly applicable to searching in general, although I learned some specific useful information about census data. One relevant, if somewhat obvious, thing that I did learn was to be willing to go back to an old search strategy if other things change: although Community Facts did not work for my mobile device search, it worked very well for my demographic information search.

Along the same lines, I also learned to remain flexible about what information you are searching for. Keep in mind your goal in collecting information rather than focusing too narrowly on the information itself--I thought I wanted mobile device data, but I was able to get useful information from demographic data even though at the beginning I would have considered that information 'irrelevant.'

American FactFinder search part 4

I'm now looking for the following information using the Community Facts function:
-Age demographics of Norman, OK
-Education levels in Norman, OK
-Number of speakers of languages other than English, and what languages they speak, in Norman, OK

As I did in my initial search, I entered "Norman, OK" into the search box (it offered the correction "Norman city, OK" which I accepted). Here is the results landing page.


As you can see, we've got tabs on the left-hand side for all three pieces of information I am searching for. I'll show the search for education information as an example and then report all three findings in the results post to follow.


As you can see, we're looking here at the information under the Education tab. We have one big piece of information visible right away--the high school diploma rate is about 93%, which I know is much higher than the national average. So I already know that my website audience is going to be more educated, and thus probably more literate, than the average U.S. audience. If I want more detail, I can open one of the suggested tables to get that detail. Below we are looking at a small piece of the Educational Attainment table (the first suggestion in the image above).
 
 Here we can see that in the adult population, about 1/4 have a high school education and no higher, about 1/4 have a bachelor's degree and no higher, and about 1/4 have a higher degree.

American FactFinder search part 3

For this post I am seeing if Guided Search will enable me to find the information I am hoping is in the database about smartphone/mobile device ownership. Guided Search is a neat step-by-step process that I would definitely recommend to a new user trying to figure out this database. Here is what it looks like:

However, on step 2, topics, I explored the various categories that I could learn about and discovered that American FactFinder does not have data on mobile phone ownership, at least as far as I can tell.

However, looking at the list of  people topics, I could see that it would have some other local information about my target user group that I could use to improve my website design. Specifically, we know that people of different ages and different education levels tend to use websites differently. We also know that if there is a significant non-English-speaking population in our area, we need to expand our (mostly English-language) site accordingly. Information about age, education, and language are things I probably could get from FactFinder. In fact, from looking at Community Facts early in my search, I already know that the median age is reported there.

This data is more basic and the Community Facts function is so easy to use that I returned to the latter to search for my new information. See the next post.