[acs-r] Calculating median income for a new geography

[Ezra Haber Glenn]

Kate:

Unfortunately, as I understand it, you simply cannot compute an actual
median from a group of medians -- the exact data you need is  not
there.  

There are ways to approximate this -- a median of medians or a mean of
medians (or even a weighted mean of medians) -- but they are sort of 
guesses and approximations.  That said, for lots of planning types
applications, close enough is close enough.  But maybe check with a
statistician friend and discuss your options.

--Ezra

At Tue, 12 Jan 2016 09:01:52 -0800, Kate Kelsey wrote:
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> Hi All,
> I am working on a project where I need to calculate median household income for a group of
> census tracts.  
> Because this is median income I can't just add the median income for each tract and divide
> by the total number of households. 
> Does anyone have any code they can share to do this?
> Thanks,
> Kate 
> 
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--
Ezra Haber Glenn, AICP
Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Ave., Room 7-337
Cambridge, MA 02139
eglenn at mit.edu 
http://dusp.mit.edu/faculty/ezra-glenn | http://eglenn.scripts.mit.edu/citystate/
617.253.2024 (w)
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