Following the example of a recent article from Pew Research, we will compare some of Arkansas demographics with those of the United States as a whole in two ways. In this first post we will only be using the estimated data for the 2013-2017 period and in the second we will compare them across various points in time. The data we will look are how the Millennial population compares to the Baby Boomer one, the racial distribution, how many children live in married households and how many live with unmarried partners, and what the percentage of population that is foreign born and where they are from.
Figure 1:
The Baby Boomers were born between the mid-1940s and the early 1960s, while the Millennials were born between the early 1980s and the mid-1990s. We used the same age groups of 23-38 and 55-73 as Pew Research to represent the Millennials and Baby Boomers, respectively. As we can see in the above [graph] Arkansas has a slightly larger population of Baby Boomers than Millennials with around 21.0% and 21.6%, respectively. This is reversed for the United States as a whole where around 22.0% of the population are Millennials and 21.3% are Baby Boomers.
Figure 2:
Looking at both racial and ethnic identity, Arkansas differs slightly from the U.S. as a whole. The White population still has the largest share, but is 10 percentage points larger in Arkansas. People who identify as Black or from African descent hold a similar share of the population at 15.4% in Arkansas and 12.3% in the United States. The Hispanics and Asians populations in Arkansas are roughly 60% and 75% lower than in the rest of country.
Figure 3:
The number of children living in married households or with unmarried partners are similar for both the country and the state. In Arkansas 63.7% of children living in households live with people who are married, while in the U.S. this number slightly increases to 66.3%. In terms of unmarried partners, 7.5% of children live in this type of household in Arkansas and 7.8 in the United States. At first glance it may appear that Arkansas numbers are similar to the nations, even if a bit lower, however this difference translates to 3 percentage points more children living in other type of households in Arkansas, specifically single-parent households.
Figure 4:
Figure 5:
Around 13% of the population in the United States are people that were born in another country. This migration is composed mostly of people from Latin American (51.2%) or Asian (30.5%) origin. Foreign born people account for only 4.7% of the population, similarly to the nation this group is mainly people from Latin America and Asia, with 62.0% and 23.7% respectively.
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