2014/05/13 by John Logan, John R. Logan, Zengwang Xu +1 · 6 citations
Environmental Science · Medicine · #Atmospheric and Environmental Gas Dynamics #Data-Driven Disease Surveillance #Impact of Light on Environment and Health
paper · doi:10.1080/00330124.2014.905156
crossref issued 2014/05/13 · crossref published 2014/05/13 · crossref published-online 2014/05/13 · openalex publication_date 2014/05/13 · crossref created 2014/05/13 · crossref published-print 2014/07/03 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · crossref deposited 2023/07/13 · crossref indexed 2026/07/30 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Differences in the reporting units of data from diverse sources and changes in units over time are common obstacles to analysis of areal data. We compare common approaches to this problem in the context of changes over time in the boundaries of U.S. census tracts. In every decennial census many tracts are split, consolidated, or changed in other ways from the previous boundaries to reflect population growth or decline. We examine two interpolation methods to create a bridge between years, one that relies only on areal weighting and another that also introduces population weights. Results demonstrate that these approaches produce substantially different estimates for variables that involve population counts, but they have a high degree of convergence for variables defined as rates or averages. Finally the paper describes the Longitudinal Tract Data Base (LTDB), through which we are making available public-use tools to implement these methods to create estimates within 2010 tract boundaries for any tract-level data (from the census or other sources) that are available for prior years as early as 1970.