4 hours agoHow to Tackle Fraudulent Survey ResponsesIn 2022, the Upward Mobility research team fielded an online community survey to build a demographically representative sample of 10 US cities for the Upward Mobility research project. To boost response rates, we advertised through social media and offered a $5 gift card incentive for completing the survey. …Qualtrics7 min readQualtrics7 min read
Sep 12Communicating Synthetic Data Evaluation Results with a Parameterized R Markdown ReportRecently, a team of Urban Institute researchers partnered with the Allegheny County Department of Human Services and Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center to create a fully synthetic version of the department’s confidential data tracking individual usage of child welfare services, behavioral health services, aging services, developmental support services, homeless and…R Markdown5 min readR Markdown5 min read
Jun 8How We’re Tackling Performance Bottlenecks in the Education Data Portal APIFor more than five years, the Education Data Portal has been a one-stop shop for all major national datasets on schools, districts, and colleges. During this time, we’ve developed a number of tools and features to make these data increasingly accessible to a range of audiences. …API5 min readAPI5 min read
May 4How Web Scraping Powered Our Analysis of Work-Based Learning Opportunities in Community CollegesCommunity colleges play a vital role in building America’s workforce, helping students realize their career goals and providing them with the skills to meet employer needs. With career-focused curricula and diverse student populations, community colleges also offer an ideal setting for work-based learning, which consists of opportunities such as internships…Web Scraping7 min readWeb Scraping7 min read
Apr 13One Graph or Many: Taking an Equity Lens When Visualizing Data by RaceFor many data communicators, presenting data disaggregated by race or ethnicity can pose a tricky problem. It’s not uncommon to place the data for each group in a single graph, but this presentation can lead the reader to compare the performance of each group to the best performing group, creating…Data Visualization7 min readData Visualization7 min read
Mar 23Understanding the Potential of Text Mining for Equity AnalysisNatural language processing, or NLP, is a fundamental tool in our everyday lives — whether it’s a search engine automatically generating our query or our phone autocorrecting a misspelling. At the Urban Institute, we employ NLP to transform large volumes of unstructured human language into structured data that enables our…Text Mining9 min readText Mining9 min read
Mar 16Modeling the Effects of Land-Use Policy on Housing Construction in the Washington, DC, RegionIn the 1980s, the Urban Institute developed a housing market simulation model to assess the relationships between public policies and household incomes, individual demographics, and housing affordability across a metropolitan region. This model assumed that housing property development is elastic, meaning if consumers can afford new housing, developers will provide…Housing Crisis7 min readHousing Crisis7 min read
Feb 27The Potential of Machine Learning for Compiling Standardized Zoning DataZoning codes, or the official documents that regulate a jurisdiction’s land use, contain an enormous amount of information about what buildings can be built in an area and how they can be used, with clear implications for racial equity, housing affordability, economic development, and environmental impact. Yet zoning documents are…Zoning8 min readZoning8 min read
Dec 15, 2022Data@Urban’s Top Posts of 2022Choosing the right OCR service for extracting text data Optical character recognition (OCR) services vary by cost, ease of use, confidentiality and ability to handle other types of data. We compared four examples that vary across these dimensions. 2. How can data communicators lead equity awareness and inclusivity efforts for…Data Science2 min readData Science2 min read
Nov 3, 2022How We Adapted the Capital for Communities Scorecard to Better Understand Community NeedsIn 2019, a collaborative group of researchers, programmers, and designers set out to design an evidence-based tool that could support positive outcomes among Opportunity Zone (OZ) investments. …Community4 min readCommunity4 min read
