Hi,
I am using time series and census-tract level Table: B84. Persons 16 Years and Over by Labor Force and Employment Status [6] for years 2006-2010, 2007-2011, 2008-2012, 2009-2013, 2010-2014, 2011-2015, 2012-2016, 2013-2017, 2014-2018, 2015-2019, 2016-2020, and 2017-2021 to calculate unemployment rates.
The table is broken down into:
B84AA: Persons: 16 years and over ~ In labor force
B84AB: Persons: 16 years and over ~ In labor force–In Armed Forces
B84AC: Persons: 16 years and over ~ In labor force–Civilian
B84AD: Persons: 16 years and over ~ In labor force–Civilian–Employed
B84AE: Persons: 16 years and over ~ In labor force–Civilian–Unemployed
B84AF: Persons: 16 years and over ~ Not in labor force
However, B84AA is not equal to B84AB+B84AC. And B84AC is not equal to B84AD+B84AE. I wonder why there are differences.
Thank you!
Thanks for sharing these details. They led me to an error in our NHGIS time series data that should explain what you’ve described.
For the 2006-2010 period, the B84AC time series (… In labor force–Civilian) omits population age 65 and over.
To correct for this omission, you could recalculate the 2006-2010 counts accurately by summing time series B84AD and B84AE. (Those time series don’t omit the population 65 and over.) You should also find that B84AA is equal to the sum of the three time series B84AB, B84AD, B84AE.
The data for all other years are, to my knowledge, accurate for all of these time series.
We’ll correct the 2006-2010 data for B84AC in a future release. I’ll try to update this forum post after we’ve done that.
An explanation for the error for those interested… Prior to the 2011 ACS data release, the ACS summary files didn’t contain a single table that provided exactly the counts in this time series table (as table B23025 does in later years). We chose to derive the 2006-2010 data in this time series table from B23001 (Sex by Age by Employment Status for the Population 16 Years and Over) by aggregating from counts broken down by sex and age. B23001 includes counts covering all age groups over age 16, except for the Armed Forces counts and the total Civilian counts, which stop at age 64. I believe that’s because persons older than that cannot serve in the armed forces, so the table doesn’t distinguish between Civilian and Armed Forces for those ages. When we associated B23001’s variables with time series, we accidentally limited the age categories in the “In labor force–Civilian” time series to those that were explicitly identified in the source table, i.e., only up through age 64. We should instead include the separate counts for Employed and Unemployed population age 65 and over to produce a correct full total for the Civilian population. That’s the correction that we’ll make in a future release.
Thank you! These are very helpful.