Research

Farming has a semi-mythological status unlike any other industry or occupation. In few places is this more true than Virginia, which was founded on farming and particularly tobacco farming. For much of Virginia’s history, its population was shaped by agriculture. Most early Virginians came to the state as either indentured servants or slaves to work […]

A couple of weeks back, I attended the 2015 ACS Data Users Conference and heard a lot of concerned researchers discussing the impact of losing the 3-year estimates from the American Community Survey. In the past, the Census Bureau provided separate 1-year, 3-year, and 5-year estimates – but funding constraints have resulted in the discontinuation […]

April 14 of this year marked what is known as Equal Pay Day, the representing “how far into the year women must work to earn what men earned in the previous year.”  The choice of date is based on research demonstrating that women earn approximately 77 cents for every dollar earned by their male counterparts.  Whether it […]

Everyday, medical professionals diagnose and treat cancer patients, clinical researchers look for ways to prevent and cure cancer, and policy makers allocate resources for advancement of cancer programs. With the Commonwealth’s population growing and aging, we, as demographers, attempted to see how many people may be diagnosed with cancer over the next few decades. Earlier […]

During most of the 20th century, the neighborhoods where people lived and worked in Richmond — even the boundaries of the city — were shaped by race. For decades after WWII, the city’s leaders fought a well-publicized battle to maintain this system and prevent the city’s population from becoming majority black. In recent years, Richmond […]

For many of us, the morning commute is often not the best part of the day; however some may actually enjoy this time, managing to find peace and productivity during the trip into their workplace. Countless articles discuss the impact of commuting on the average person’s quality of life, with the costs – time lost in […]

Fivethirtyeight’s Ben Casselman published an article recently entitled “Think Millennials Prefer the City? Think Again.” He cites the most recently published migration data from the Census Bureau’s CPS (Current Population Survey) to show that more millennials moved from “principal cities” (a designation of the Office of Management and Budget) to “suburbs” in 2013-2014: “529,000 Americans ages […]

When it comes to the social safety net, myths and half-truths, rather than reality, often shape our conception of who depends on the net and the value of these programs. It is easy to lose sight of what these programs do for families, especially if one lives in a household that has never qualified for […]

The Washington Post recently published a graphic showing where the 100 U.S. senators went to college. It might be nothing more than an interesting bit of biographical information about our elected officials, but it could also be meaningful. For educated and increasingly mobile Americans, college is often a formative experience and a college’s culture can […]

A while back, I wrote a post on the transformation of US cities over the last two decades, using Charlotte, Houston, Atlanta, and Denver as examples. That investigation, using graphs to show changes in the city from the core to the periphery, turned into a larger report that was just released today.In order to get a […]