A Public Use Microdata Area, or PUMA, are geographic units used by the
US Census for providing statistical and demographic information. Each PUMA contains at least 100,000 people. PUMAs do not overlap, and are contained within a single
state
State may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Literature
* ''State Magazine'', a monthly magazine published by the U.S. Department of State
* ''The State'' (newspaper), a daily newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina, United States
* ''Our S ...
. PUMAs were first created for the
1990 Census.
For the 2012
American Community Survey
The American Community Survey (ACS) is a demographics survey program conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. It regularly gathers information previously contained only in the long form of the decennial census, such as ancestry, citizenship, educati ...
(ACS), there are 2,378 PUMAs.
PUMAs allow the Census to publish census data for sub-state areas throughout every state. For example, the ACS publishes detailed data every year, but due to their sampling procedure only publishes data for census area that have more than 65,000 People. Only seven of the 55 counties of West Virginia were large enough to receive estimates from the 2006 ACS. In contrast, all 12 PUMAs that partition West Virginia received 2006 ACS estimates.
The state governments drew PUMA boundaries for the
2000 Census, to allow reporting of detailed data for all areas. There were a total of 2,071 PUMAs in the 2000 Census.
See also
*
Census tract
A census tract, census area, census district or meshblock is a geographic region defined for the purpose of taking a census. Sometimes these coincide with the limits of cities, towns or other administrative areas and several tracts commonly exis ...
*
Census block A census block is the smallest geographic unit used by the United States Census Bureau for tabulation of 100-percent data (data collected from all houses, rather than a sample of houses). The number of blocks in the United States, including Puerto R ...
References
External links
* https://www.census.gov/acs/www/Downloads/Handbook2006.pdf
* https://www.census.gov/geo/reference/puma.html
* https://www.census.gov/geo/reference/gtc/gtc_pumas.html
{{USCensus Geography
United States Census Bureau geography