LITTLE ROCK — The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette arrived at demographic figures for the Little Rock School District’s voting zones by using geographical mapping software to group counts from the city’s census blocks, which are the smallest unit of measurement used by the U.S. Census Bureau.
To give the closest approximation of the voting zones’ populations without introducing estimation, the newspaper chose to group census blocks that fell on boundary lines by where their geographic center fell rather than dividing blocks.
Demographic information was culled from two census bureau data sets to allow for comparison to 2000 counts calculated for the district by Metroplan, which included those who identify as Hispanic in the census bureau’s counts of black, white or any other races.
Census forms include one question that asks a resident to identify as a race such as black, white or Asian, and a separate question on ethnicity that asks if a person identifies as Hispanic or non-Hispanic. The newspaper calculated a separate category for Hispanics from census data on the basis of the latter question.
Front Section, Pages 11 on 07/10/2011