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Special Features
Changes in the Lives of America's Children: 1990 to 2000
This special section, Changes in the Lives
of America’s Children: 1990 to 2000,
provides information about children for all
50 States and the District of Columbia from the
1990 and 2000 Censuses. This special census
data section discusses nine indicators covering
three general domains of the report:
Population and Family Characteristics,
Economic Security, and Education.
Introduction
The key indicators presented in America’s Children come from a wide variety of data sources, including
routine surveys, administrative data, estimation systems, and special or one-time data collections.
Consideration has been given over time to data sources that allow for routine updating in the report. Most of
these data sources, while recurring, can only provide information about children for the Nation, as a whole.
At the same time, data users and policy-makers continue to look for indicators of child well-being that can
describe the status of children in States and if possible, at even smaller geographic areas.
Once every 10 years, the decennial census provides the opportunity to generate snapshots of the population
for very small geographic units. Much more than a complete count of the Nation’s population, the census
provides important social, economic, and housing detail about the population, allowing policy-makers and
planners to see how characteristics have changed over time in cities, towns, and neighborhoods.
The data presented in this special decennial census section show change for two points in time only, 1990 and
2000, and thus does not consider the point in time that a trend may have changed direction or stabilized
during the intervening years. When fully implemented, the American Community Survey (ACS) will provide
updates of these characteristics for all states, cities, counties, metropolitan areas, and population groups of
65,000 or more every year, replacing the once-every-ten-year collection of these items. This will allow data users
to see the fluctuations in the characteristics that occur between the years of the decennial censuses.
This section presents nine indicators of child well-being from the 1990 and 2000 decennial Censuses, closely
aligned to indicators presented routinely in this volume. What is unique about this section is that data for the
items highlighted here are shown for all 50 States and the District of Columbia. Doing so allows one to see the
variability that exists across the Nation, as well as providing details of change during the past decade.
The scope of the census content is not as wide as that of the 20-plus indicators America’s Children routinely
provides. This special census data section discusses nine indicators, covering three general domains of the
report: Population and Family Characteristics, Economic Security, and Education. Because of differences in
questionnaire design and administration, estimates from the census may not be exactly comparable to those
from the routine measures reported in America’s Children. However, because these data are all from the same
data collection instrument, and the instrument changed little from 1990 to 2000, they provide a rare and
consistent glimpse of the change in several indicators for the States as well as the Nation as a whole.101
In all the maps shown in this section, estimates, which are based on a sample of the population, are used to
partition the States into groups that reflect a specific percentage point change range between 1990 and 2000.
As with all sample survey estimates, these estimates may vary from the actual values due to sampling and
nonsampling errors, which could possibly result in a State being assigned to a different group. States in
different groups may not be significantly different from one another, and States in the same group may be
significantly different.
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