Handling Data Quality Information of Survey Data in GIS: A Case of Using the American Community Survey Data

Abstract

Many survey datasets have relatively high levels of error. The American Community Survey (ACS) data disseminated by the U.S. Census Bureau offer critical socio-demographic data of the U.S. and include a margin of error to indicate the reliability of an estimate for each census unit. Such feature-based reliability data should be incorporated when using ACS data in GIS such that users are informed of the data quality. This paper provides a brief review of the ACS data. Challenges to the use of ACS data quality information in GIS are discussed. The paper briefly reviews a set of mapping tools packaged as an ArcGIS extension to tackle some challenges in incorporating the data quality information in ACS data. These mapping functions can also be used to handle other survey spatial datasets with reliability information. The extension provides a foundation to build additional GIS tools to handle and analyze survey data.