Making National Data Local: Using American FactFinder to Describe Local Hispanic Communities

Author

Marta Alvira-Hammond

Elizabeth Wildsmith

NOTE: The U.S. Census Bureau retired its American FactFinder tool on March 31, 2020. Data releases formerly found on American FactFinder, and new releases moving forward, can now be found on data.census.gov. Learn more about the transition.

Local agencies and leaders work hard to meet the service needs of low-income Hispanic populations in their communities. Having up-to-date, high-quality information on the local Hispanic population—and the diversity within this population—is critical. In this guide, we describe how agencies can use the U.S. Census Bureau’s American FactFinder tool to get data from the American Community Survey (ACS) for their local area. We also demonstrate how to generate results answering these questions for multiple time periods, how to export American FactFinder results into user-friendly tables, and how to interpret some basic results.

The National Research Center on Hispanic Children & Families (Center) is supported by grant #90PH0028 from the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The Center is led by Child Trends, in partnership with Duke University, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and University of Maryland, College Park. The contents of this website are solely the responsibility of the Center and do not necessarily represent the official views of the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, the Administration for Children and Families, or the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.