Quick Links

Link to Last Month's Newsletter

and link to 2nd online training if available?    

ARDA releases U.S. Religion Census: Religious Congregations and Membership Study, 2010 (County File)

It's been over 75 years since the Census abandoned collection of data about religion - which has made updating some of Kumlien's work from 1935 somewhere between difficult and impossible.  ARDA (The Association of Religious Data Archives) has released the data, at a county level, at http://www.thearda.com/Archive/ChCounty.asp .  For anyone who wants to know what changes in religion have occurred in his or her county since 1906, the data is available.  Kumlien asked the question, "Is South Dakota Over-churched?" in the mid 1930's.  Now, with internet access, any of us can look at the data and decide whether our state is overchurched or not.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration has released "Mental Health United States 2010".  At 376 pages, if you don't like it, there's plenty to dislike at http://www.samhsa.gov/data/2k12/MHUS2010/MHUS-2010.pdf.

On the other hand, current state level data on mental health may be useful, or interest some of our readers - one of the upbeat things is that South Dakota was tied with Hawaii for the lowest amount of serious mental illness - just 3.4%.   

Other charts provide information about funding levels, levels of depression, suicide, etc.  One of the advantages of the computer is that we can add books that were once both obscure and expensive to a personal electronic library at no extra cost.

-Mike McCurry, State Demographer  

With the National Grandparents Day marked on September 9, 2012, here are few quick facts about grandparents living with their grandchildren under 18 years in South Dakota from the latest American Community Survey, five year estimates (2006-2010).

• The total number of grandparents in South Dakota who reported living with grandchildren less than 18 years of age was 10,170 of which 36.7% were grandfathers and 63.3% were grandmothers.
• 58.7% of the grandparents were identified as responsible for their grandchildren. Out of these caregivers, 20% were grandfathers and 38.7% were grandmothers.
• 61.4% of the grandparents responsible for their grandchildren lived in a three-generational household (presence of parents of grandchildren) and 38.6% of grandparents lived in a skipped-generational household (absence of parents of grandchildren).
• 4,054 of the total number of grandparents responsible for their grandchildren reported were in the labor force whereas 1,921 of the grandparents responsible for their grandchildren were not in the labor force.
• 1,676 of the total grandparents responsible for their grandchildren had an income below poverty level whereas 4,299 of the total grandparents responsible for their grandchildren had income at or above poverty level.
• The median family income in the past 12 months (2009 to 2010) with grandparent householder responsible for grandchildren was $34,494 whereas the median family income of grandparent householder with the absence of parents of grandchildren was $35,147.
• 5,868 of the grandparents responsible for their grandchildren are national-born whereas 107 of them are foreign-born.
• The race/ethnicity reported by grandparents responsible for their grandchildren were: White (47.8%); Black or African American (2.5%); American Indian and Alaska Native (48.1%); Two or more races (0.5%); Hispanic (3.2%).
-Prekchya Singh
PhD Student in Sociology

The Rural Life and Census Data Center is pleased to be able to offer the following training sessions, open to all interested parties.  

October 9

Confidence Levels and Confidence Intervals - How Trustworthy is the Data? by Mike McCurry

November 13 

South Dakota's Population Projections by Eric Guthrie

December 11

Components of Population Change by Eric Guthrie and Mike McCurry.

The session will begin at 3:00 pm on the designated dates and can be accessed at:

https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?sid=2007004&password=M.5D9C5B7B3ADEC30581E3E81091794C

If you wish to sit in on the session(s) in person, come to Scobey Hall room 213 on the SDSU campus at the designated time.
Sessions will be archived with the links to be published in future newsletters.

The National Employment Law Project (NELP) released an 8-page brief on job-loss and job-gain trends after the recession (http://www.nelp.org/page/-/Job_Creation/LowWageRecovery2012.pdf?nocdn=1).   

Their analysis was of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Population Survey (http://www.bls.gov/cps/), but an 8 page synopsis takes a lot less time to read.   

Instead of listening to politicians explain why you're better off, or worse off, than you were four years ago, a glance at their charts does a nice job of showing which workers have lost the most, and which have seen the biggest comebacks.  It's interesting to note that, while federal jobs increased during the recession (the Census?), government jobs at all levels, federal, state and local have decreased during the recovery.  

The Bureau of Transportation Statistics has released "State Transportation Statistics: 2011."  This 148 page document (http://www.bts.gov/publications/state_transportation_statistics/state_transportation_statistics_2011/pdf/entire.pdf) is loaded with some rather intriguing data - for example, it shows that South Dakota has 5,877 bridges; then it shows 1,217 as structurally deficient, and 218 obsolete.  Numbers that might bother a driver until you look at Pennsylvania, with 24.9 percent of its bridges structurally deficient, and 16.8 percent obsolete.  A friend (retired railroader) was trying to explain how rail transportation of oil was environmentally superior to pipelines - but this provides the documentation to check his opinions.  If you want a real surprise, go to F-11 to see what gas prices, without taxes were, in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

Mike McCurry, Ph.D.

An article in the Daily Yonder got me looking at the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.  That sort of title kind of screams out that there may be some useful data here (the Census isn't the sole source of useful data).   

One set included life expectancy tables for each county in the US - something we're happy to see, since it's always nice to find someone else has done calculations that let you check your figures. It was particularly pleasant to see that the University of Washington agreed with our calculations on Shannon and Jackson Counties - the Pine Ridge Reservation.  

Last May, a New York Times columnist described life expectancy on the Pine Ridge as ". . . somewhere around the high 40s - shorter than the average for sub-Saharan Africa."  It's pleasant to see UW confirming that life expectancy on the Pine Ridge is over 70.   

You can access the report at http://www.pophealthmetrics.com/content/9/1/16.  The title "Falling behind: life expectancy in US counties from 2000 to 2007 in an international context" may not sound so upbeat - but in South Dakota, whether on or off reservation, life expectancy increased.

To access more of their articles, the website is http://www.healthmetricsandevaluation.org/publications/research-articles.

Mike McCurry, Ph.D.

We need to thank Dr. Amy Glasmeier of MIT's Geography department for developing a Living Wage Calculator (http://livingwage.mit.edu/) that provides information at the county level.  (All right, her grad student, Eric Schultheis, did the work).  In 2009, Kristi Corcoran developed a small book of this data for South Dakota (EC 930, Wages Required for Self-Sufficiency in South Dakota).  With the updated data available online, we won't need to update that book. 

It was interesting to examine her results - the living wage minimum for a single adult in Brookings County was $6.90/hour, while in Shannon County (frequently mentioned as the poorest county in the US, and always a contender for that title) the living wage minimum was $7.29. 

Another webpage she has developed is the Community Economic Development Toolbox at http://economictoolbox.mit.edu/. This also breaks down data to county level - I was pleased to see charts that supported our study of job growth in Indian Country - where the Employment Growth Index between 1990 and 2003 in Buffalo, Dewey, Shannon, Dewey, and Todd Counties exceeded South Dakota's Employment Growth Index.  I won't go into the counties that were below the state average - you can click the link and check things out on your own.

-Mike McCurry, Ph.D.

The Census released the 2011 Annual Survey of Public Employment & Payroll on August 23. While federal data is not yet available, summaries of state and local government employment are - for South Dakota, the state government summary is at http://www2.census.gov/govs/apes/11stsd.txt , while the local government summary is at http://www2.census.gov/govs/apes/11locsd.txt. 

A few numbers I found interesting is that South Dakota employs 1,456 instructional employees in higher education, and 2,683 other employees, for a total of 4,139 higher ed employees.  Local governments employ 250 instructional employees and 217 other employees in higher education.  On the other hand, local government employs 13,462 elementary and secondary instructional employees and 3,922 other employees. It's an interesting document if you want to see what's happening in our state and in the nation.

-Mike McCurry, Ph.D.

The National Center for Health Statistics has released "Death in the United States, 2010" ( http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db99.pdf  ).  That may be a title that only a demographer will like - but it's filled with good news - between 2009 and 2010, the average life expectancy went up by a tenth of a year.  Infant mortality has dropped to the lowest level in US history.  South Dakota's age-adjusted death rate is lower than the US average, and, looking at the statistics, you'd have a hard time convincing me that I should move to Mississippi.  It's only 8 pages, and well worth the read.

-Mike McCurry, Ph.D.

In August, the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics released "Characteristics of Recent Science and Engineering Graduates: 2008" (http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf12328/pdf/nsf12328.pdf).  The report includes information related to bachelors and masters degrees, in both the hard and soft sciences, as well as engineering, and includes the numbers (national) of full-time students in each discipline.

It can be a little confusing - the numbers look a bit large until you check the definition of recent graduate and learn that group graduated between July 1, 2005 and June 30, 2007 - so there are two graduating classes in the statistics.  It's just one of those documents that is improved by going to the back and reading the appendix and definitions first.

There were some unchanging facts - chemical and electrical engineers had the highest median salaries for new graduates.  Chemical Engineers are the most likely to be employed in science and engineering.  As a nation, we're graduating a lot of folks in psychology - 184,000 of the 1.128 million science and engineering graduates held a bachelors degree in psychology - over 16 percent.  Fifteen thousand held jobs in a science and engineering profession.  Biology was second in total new graduates - 147,000 (13 percent)., with 29,000 employed in science and engineering. 

Health occupations were at the end of the list - but there were 194,000 health graduates (17 percent), with 136,000 working in science and engineering professions.

This 165 page report might be a good reference for anyone who deals with college-bound students.

-Mike McCurry, PhD. 

PEW Research Center released a report titled simply "A Third of Americans Now Say They Are in the Lower Classes" (http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2012/09/the-lower-classes-final.pdf ).  That's the sort of title that makes me wonder what else I can say.  That's up from from a quarter in 2008, and demographically, more young adults are self-classifying as lower class than before - but click on the link, and read the whole article -its only 16 pages, so even if you don't like it, it's not like its long enough to get angry about.

-Mike McCurry, Ph.D.

The National Center for Education Statistics has released "Postsecondary Institutions and Price of Attendance in 2011-12, Degrees and Other Awards Conferred: 2010-11, and 12-Month Enrollment: 2010-11 First Look (Provisional Data)"  (http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2012/2012289rev.pdf ).

This may be more interesting to those of us working in the Postsecondary business, or to people who have kids either in colleges or going there soon.  The cost data made me feel pleased to be in South Dakota's more affordable system - on the other hand, I was surprised to see that almost ten percent of the nation's population was enrolled in postsecondary education during 2010-2011.  About 57½ percent of the student body was female.  As always, for more data, click the link and download the report.

 -Mike McCurry, Ph.D.