Data Sources in the Social Sciences

To do analysis of Community Areas of Chicago using SimplyAnalytics a few steps are required. 

1. Login to SimplyAnalytics, this is important to make sure you can save your work. 

2. On the right side of the main screen, select location, then under custom location, click 'show', then select 'create new custom location

3. Name your custom location, then copy and paste each census tract for a community area into the location search field on the right.  Click the results to add them to the custom location.

A List of Census Tracts by Community Area are listed here

4. Once you have added all the necessary information, click save.  The Custom location should be available in all future projects under 'view my custom locations'

Custom Locations do not work for all data.  Data that are not available at the census tract level will not be available in custom locations.  Percentages are not always properly calculated for custom locations.  However, for most percentages, the total numbers are available and can be exported to other programs for mathematical processing. 

Custom locations are most useful for the comparison report feature, which allow for exporting data to statistical tables. 

For maps, under the 'view actions' menu at the top, the location map checkbox allows for only displaying selected areas.