Posts by Jason Cheung
Case Study: Building a Data Platform to Explore Childhood Experiences in Connecticut

Understanding childhood experiences, both positive and negative, is important to inform public health policies and prevention strategies directed to children and youth. While data related to childhood experiences exists in various data sources, our goal was to create the first data platform in Connecticut to synthesize these data sources in a user-friendly way through the use of effective visualizations and interactive dashboards.

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Check Out Our 2020 Demographics and Housing Explorer!

The 2020 Demographic and Housing Characteristics File (DHC), released by the U.S. Census Bureau in May 2023, is one of many data products released as part of the 2020 decennial census. The DHC file includes detailed tables on topics such as age, sex, race, ethnicity, along with many topics about households and families.

The raw data can be downloaded on the Census Bureau’s website, but CTData has created a 2020 Demographics and Housing Explorer for data users to easily access and explore data found in the DHC file. Click the button or preview below to explore data for your town!

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Explore Our Newly Released Data Platform on Childhood Experiences!

CTData has just released the Adverse and Positive Childhood Experiences: Data to Action Platform, which makes data on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and Positive Childhood Experiences (PCEs) in Connecticut available to the general public. This data platform was developed by CTData in collaboration with the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Connecticut Health Center.

This blog post explains the importance of ACEs and PCEs, along with some information about the data sources we used for our analyses and visualizations. The full data to action platform includes interactive tools to explore ACE and PCE data, along with resources such as infographics and data downloads.

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Connecticut Evictions Have Surpassed Pre-Pandemic Levels

In February 2022, we released a shocking analysis of the eviction crisis in Connecticut diving into topics such as the disparities of evictions of certain demographics, along with analysis of representation in court and the outcomes depending on representation. We are working on an updated analysis with evictions data through the end of 2022, which will be released sometime in the next few months. This blog post will provide a general overview of eviction trends from 2017 through the end of 2022.

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Jason Cheung
New Connecticut Data Shows: Increase in Remote Work, Higher Rent Costs, and a Shift in Occupations

The Covid-19 pandemic has impacted the lives of Connecticut residents in many ways, from introducing many workers to remote work to exacerbating the financial struggles of others. Last year, the U.S. Census Bureau announced that standard 2020 ACS 1-year estimates would not be released, as Covid-19 severely impacted the data collection process and ultimately resulted in estimates that did not meet the Census Bureau’s Statistical Data Quality Standards. The Census Bureau was able to work through data collection challenges this year and released ACS 2021 1-year estimates on September 15, 2022.

In this post, we analyze changes from pre-pandemic (2019 ACS 1-year estimates) to the most recent time frame of data we have (2021 ACS 1-year estimates) to explore the impact of the pandemic on Connecticut residents and workers.

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Older Connecticut Residents Have Higher Student Loan Debt: Explore Connecticut Student Loan Debt

As of March 2022, over 45 million residents in the United States had outstanding principal and interest balances on their federal student loans, with an average balance of $35,685 per borrower. The Census Bureau reports 156 million residents who have at least some college education, meaning nearly 3 in 10 (29%) who attended or are attending higher education have outstanding student debt. This results in a total of over $1.6 trillion in outstanding debt, not including balances from private loans. Note that 9% of these borrowers were unable to be categorized into one of the fifty states (these categories included Puerto Rico, District of Columbia, Other, and Not Reported).

This post will explore and further dive into the student loan portfolio data published by the U.S. Department of Education.

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EducationJason Cheung
Looking For Town-Level Data? We've Got You Covered!

As Connecticut’s State Data Center, we develop many tools and reports to help agencies and data users across Connecticut to understand their community. For many of these tools and reports, we disaggregate our analysis where possible — such as by geography, race/ethnicity, gender/sex, and age. We receive many questions about accessing town-level data for various topics, so we have compiled several of our data tools and reports below.

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CTData NewsJason Cheung
2020 Census Demographic Analysis By The "Five Connecticuts"

Over the past several months, we have explored population changes in Connecticut from 2010 to 2020, touching on topics such as overall changes, diversity, housing, analysis for specific towns, and more. In this short blog post, we explore population changes by race and ethnicity for each of the “Five Connecticuts,” a system developed by the University of Connecticut.

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PUMAs: What They Are And How You Can Help

During CTData’s 2021 Conference, we hosted a session dedicated to Public Use Microdata Areas (PUMAs). If you attended the session, we want to thank you for engaging and offering your input and suggestions. If you missed this session, read on to learn more about what PUMAs are, why they are important, what needs to be done by January 2022, and how you can help with this important process!

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CTData Participates in The Opportunity Project!

CTData has joined The Opportunity Project as a data steward for the problem statement “Assisting Businesses, Community, and State/Local Government Leaders to Make Critical Decisions Using Decennial Data” where we will assist teams in finding relevant and accurate data from the Census Bureau and other public sources.

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CTData NewsJason Cheung
American Community Survey: Release Updates

The American Community Survey (ACS) is a survey administered by the Census Bureau covering topics such as social, economic, housing, and demographic characteristics. The ACS surveys around 3.5 million addresses and informs over $675 billion of federal government spending each year. Due to Covid-19, outreach and participation significantly decreased in 2020, and the data collected did not meet quality standards for the 2020 1-year estimates.

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2020 Decennial Census: Data Release Schedule

In 2020, CTData focused on ensuring a complete 2020 Census count in Connecticut through efforts such as tracking town and county response rates and providing resources to increase response rates in communities. Now that the data collection process has been completed, many of us are awaiting the release of 2020 Census data. Unfortunately, Covid-19 has pushed back many of the previously anticipated data product release dates.

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