Research

An average of 922,150 Virginians– 11.6% of all Commonwealth residents– participated in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) each month between January and December 2012.This social safety net program has received particular attention in recent months.  Not only has SNAP funding recently been reduced due to the expiration of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), but […]

This past weekend, The New York Times published an interactive map visualizing recently released Census data on poverty in America.  The NYT map gives information down to the census tract level; this level of precision allows the viewer to see poverty rates of not just counties and cities but, in fact, neighborhoods.As for Virginia, poverty […]

Virginia is often ranked as one of the top states for retirees, according to lists published by groups like AARP or Bankrate. Temperate climate, good healthcare, and standard of living are all listed among Virginia’s advantages. During the past decade, however, few retirees moved to Virginia, and more 65- to 74-year-olds moved out of the […]

Applying findings to Virginia from a Pew Social & Demographic Trends report, two previous blog posts examined breadwinner mothers in Virginia.  In the first post we found differences between married and unmarried breadwinner moms: Households where the breadwinning mom was married had higher income levels Married breadwinning moms had higher educational attainment Even with the […]

Have you noticed how many television channels currently have programs with story-lines woven around crime or law enforcement? With so many police dramas and crime series floating around the pool of broadcasting networks, I couldn’t help but wonder what the recent crime statistics looked like in the real world. These numbers are quite important because […]

How many of you have ever checked out Google’s Ngram Viewer?  Here’s a spin-off for any armchair demographers out there: a tool for analyzing The New York Times Weddings/Celebrations Section, WeddingCrunchers.com.  (The creators have a similar tool for rap lyrics, called Rap Stats.)If you’ve never seen or heard of an n-gram before, it’s a name […]

The recent government shutdown and flirtation with default has seriously deteriorated public trust in Congress, and in Washington more generally.  Disgust with Washington is often followed by bewilderment. How did things get this way?While there is no single answer to this question, if I had to choose one, it would be current redistricting practices. There […]

Recently, Pew Research Center reported on an increased prevalence of multigenerational families, in which children live in the same household as their grandparents. Nationally, roughly 1 million more children live in a multigenerational household in 2011 than did in 2000. In 2011, one in ten children live in a household configuration that includes at least one grandparent.The […]

One of the little noticed effects of the federal government shutdown is that many federal statistics and reports that we rely on are currently on hold.  For example, the all-too-important September jobs report never came, and if the shutdown continues, we all may miss out on measuring the unemployment rate for October.  Even updates to the […]

One of the most frequent observations from people who have recently viewed our new Racial Dot Map is the presence of these “little green boxes” scattered throughout the country.  The map displays a single dot for every person counted during the 2010 Census and every dot on the map is color-coded by race and ethnicity:  non-Hispanic […]