RightDataUSA

How to Generate Demographic Rankings



You have the ability to generate lists of states, counties, cities (and more) across various demographic categories by using the form on the Rankings page. Here are the various options from which you can choose:

General Grouping:
Category:
Show as percentage?
Year:
Geography:
Highlight this state:
Limit to this state:
Limit to this county:
Lower population limit:
Results to display
(0 = all):
Sort order:
Descending
Ascending


There are over 100 demographic characteristics in the dropdown labeled Category. These are organized into approximately a dozen groups which appear in the General Grouping dropdown. You can use that dropdown to filter (limit) the Categories to a set of specific characteristics. For example, if you select "Components" from the General Grouping dropdown, the Category dropdown will automatically limit the options to the Components of population change (births, deaths, migration and immigration).

After selecting a Category, choose whether to display the rankings as percentages by checking the "Show as percentage?" box. For example, if you select "White" as the category without checking that box, the rankings will show the number of White persons in the area that you specify; if you do check the box, the rankings will display the percentage of White persons (as a % of the total population) in that geographical area.

Next, select a Year. At this time the only rankings which are available concern current data; other census years may be added later. Year (i.e. election year) will be pertinent when ranking political data, however.

Six levels of Geography are available: state, county, city, congressional district, metropolitan ("metro") areas and designated market areas. Not all demographic characteristics are available at every level of geography; for example, components of population change are not available for cities and congressional districts.

If you are generating a lengthy list of rankings, you may wish to have areas from one particular state stand out in the list. To accomplish this, use the Highlight this state dropdown and select the desired state. Any entry in the rankings which contains that state will be highlighted in red.



The remaining user inputs deal with filtering the output:

You can select a specific state ("Limit to this state") for which to display rankings. If you are generating rankings for cities, you can select a specific county within a state ("Limit to this county"). When you select a state, the dropdown of counties will automatically populate with the counties for that state.

NOTE: If ranking cities, you must either select a single state or limit the output by population (20,000 or greater).

Enter a Lower population limit to exclude smaller areas from the rankings.

Then enter the number of Results to display. For this box and the one above, zero is used to indicate that no limits are desired.

Finally select the Sort order, which determines whether the rankings are displayed from highest-to-lowest (Descending) or lowest-to-highest (Ascending).

All of the places shown in the output of the rankings are clickable. Click on an item in the output to visit the page for that state, county, etc.