A few minor updates to the Yost Index

On the Yost Index page elsewhere on this site, you may now find national Yost Indexes at the census tract and block group levels for 1990, 2000, 2009-2013 and 2014-2018. The first two were derived from the decennial censuses while the last two were derived from the American Community Survey. Note that the 1990 and 2000 versions do not include Puerto Rico, which should be taken into account if comparing these to the later years.

There are minor changes from prior editions posted here, minor enough that anyone already using the values in a project need not replace them. The changes in these versions are as follows:

• Imputed values for missing census variables are now based on the average of five imputations, not a single imputation.
• No imputations are performed for block groups/census tracts where more than three of the seven Yost variables are missing. The number of block groups/census tracts in this category is negligible.
• I settled on two five-year ranges to capture the American Community Survey era rather than all possible five-year ranges, partly for simplicity, partly because the files take up a lot of server space. With the recent availability of data from 2015-2019, it is now possible to derive three non-overlapping five-year Yost indexes (2005-2009, 2010-2014, and 2015-2019). I will wait to derive and post these until I finish working out margins of error around the index values (i.e., each value may be seen as representing, say, plus or minus 8).
• Updated April 19: A user raised a concern with the GEOID field. This field is generated by the Census Bureau and consists of the letter G, the 2-digit state FIPS code, the number 0, the 3-digit county FIPS code, the number 0, the 6-digit census tract (with leading and trailing zeros, as appropriate), and the 1-digit block group. The user noted that the first, fourth and eighth characters contain no information and she did not want them. While there are many ways to remove these characters on the user side, I went ahead and created GEOID11 (for tract-level files) and GEOID12 (for block group-level files) that omit these characters.