Chapel Hill - Durham - Raleigh Health Insurance Coverage by County, 2019
This map was created with ArcGIS Online. Interactive maps are easy to make and can be shared or embedded in websites. The Demographics and Lifestyle group provides ready-made datasets you can use to make easy interactive maps. See the ArcGIS Online documentation to get started.
You can make a single map, side by side or swipe map of a variety of census demographic information for webpages and presentations in Social Explorer. Simple instructions for using Social Explorer map tools can be found here.
Social Explorer is the easiest tool to use but other tools may be more appropriate in certain circumstances.
data.census.gov has only the most recent years of its surveys; Social Explorer has all.
data.census.gov has all available geographies; Social Explorer has the most common ones.
data.census.gov has all available variables; Social Explorer doesn’t have variables that involve some suppression.
Only Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) tools* allow you to create your own, such as the Bureau's /mdat/ tool or IPUMS USA.
Social Explorer has this capability. (Note, the Maps interface has fewer variables than the Tables interface.)
Access PUMS data* either through the Census Bureau's /mdat/ tool, or through IPUMS USA. (Only available geographies are public use microdata areas [PUMAs, 100,000 people minimum], super-PUMAs [500,000 people minimum] or higher levels of geography, e.g., states.) Another option is to apply to use the Triangle Census Research Data Center through the Carolina Population Center, but this is a long-term process—six months or more.
data.census.gov has most of the (current) Bureau surveys; Social Explorer has a wider variety of datasets (including some non-U.S. ones); /mdat/* has the Current Population Survey (but not its full history). IPUMS offers all years of the decennial Census and ACS, and the CPS back to 1962.
See the box titled Developer Tools for Pulling Census Data for links to various options.
*If you need to use microdata and need assistance, contact the Librarian for Numeric Data Services and Data Management.
Currently all Census developer tools are built on top of the Census Bureau's APIs. If you're not familiar with APIs, please read this introduction.
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) typically make it possible to call content (in this case, Census data) directly from a provider's database. With Census data, the Bureau's APIs are excellent ways to extract a large amount of data at once, like all of the Census tracts in the country for five or ten or 500 variables.
APIs generally either require a "key" code, or may provide access to more content if you have one.
Using an API key signals to the provider that you are a legitimate user of its service rather than a malevolent attacker.
Developer pages such as the Census Bureau's (linked below) provide information about how to request an API key, and they are usually free of charge. If you're accessing an API using code (e.g., R, Python, etc.), sample code usually includes a dummy to indicate where to include your key, e.g., [insert_API_key_here].
The Census Bureau must maintain different datasets for different data collection programs. For example, the datasets for the decennial Census are different from those for the American Community Survey, which are different from the Economic Census'. Consequently, the Bureau offers separate APIs to access each program's data. Census APIs are not identical to each other in their protocols. If you switch between them, you should not expect that what you've learned in one will be fully applicable in another.
For more information see our guide: