INTRO: The non-profit I work with has been engaged in collaborative community-level social and environmental work in northern California for over 30 years. For that work we devised a socioeconomic scale (SES) that consists of five variables drawn from the 1990 decennial census. Fortunately, these variable are essentially unchanged in ACS data, so we continue to use the SES with communities. Most recently (2024), each of these communities was engaged to define its “cultural” boundary as an aggregation of several contiguous block groups (BGs). For this work, SES scores were straightforward to calculate. Now, however, we would like to look back in time (1990 to present) to determine if there are temporal trends in SES scores leading up to the present day.
SEEKING: I’m hoping to receive some expert comments on the above. In particular, do you believe it is feasible to use multiple geographic crosswalks to compare SES scores in 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2020?
P.S. I am aware of the statistical downside of drawing from both decennial and ACS datasets, but welcome comments anyway!