Research Guides: VCD 4480 Advanced Visual Communication Design: Audience Research

Questions

Who is the subject?
Who is the audience?
What do they know?
What do they think?
How do they behave?
Why do they behave this way?
How is this behavior related to the problem/solution?

from VCD-4480 syllabus

Who Spends What

Household Spending - 20th Edition by New Strategist Press
ISBN: 9781933588247
Publication Date: 2015-07-30
Examines how much American households spend on hundreds of products and services by age, income, household type, region, race, and educational attainment. Products and services include apparel, entertainment, financial products, food, gifts, health care, household furnishing, shelter, & utilities, personal care, reading, education and transportation.

BLS Consumer Expenditure Surveys

Consumer Expenditure Survey
provide information on the buying habits of American consumers, including data on their expenditures, income, and consumer unit characteristics. The survey data are collected for the Bureau of Labor Statistics by the U.S. Census Bureau.
Consumer Expenditures in 2017
This annual report includes integrated data from the Diary and Interview portions of the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE) including one-page data tables. "The tables show average expenditures, income, and characteristics for consumer units classified by 13 characteristics--quintiles of income, before-tax income class, age, size of the consumer unit, composition of the consumer unit, number of earners, housing tenure, race, type of area (urban or rural), Hispanic origin of reference person, region, occupation, and education. The report also includes a brief discussion of expenditure changes for the year, a description of the CE survey, and a short glossary."
Bureau of Labor Statistics - Indiana Data

Understanding your Market

U.S. Census Data

https://data.census.gov

Use the ADVANCED SEARCH, a menu-driven option, for accessing data by county and/or city.

You may want/need to use the American FactFinder. https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml until all the features of the "Explore Census Data" are available.

Demographics

The Racial Dot Map

This US map is a visual representation of the population density and racial diversity in the United States. The 308,745,538 dots represent "each person residing in the United States at the location they were counted during the 2010 Census."

http://demographics.coopercenter.org/racial-dot-map/

Image Copyright, 2013, Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia (Dustin A. Cable, creator)

Statista

Statista is the leading statistics company on the Internet. Statista aggregates data on a professional level from different institutes and sources. There are over 80,000 topics from more than 18,000 different sources available.

Each statistic can be downloaded in different formats so that they can be integrated into the document (Graphic PNG file, PowerPoint file, PDF file and Excel chart).

How to Video

Statista This link opens in a new window

Religious Statistics

Association of Religion Data Archives
The ARDA provides american and international, religion data for educators, journalists, religious congregations and researchers.
Pew Research Center - Religion & Public Life
"Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research."

StatsAmerica

StatsAmerica - Big Radius Tool

The Big Radius Tool is intended to provide “gross” numbers for a mileage-based radius, beginning at 50 miles and going up to 500 miles. Counties are aggregated, so this isn’t a hyper-precise tool but is intended to provide intelligence on the counties within a large (50 miles or more) radius.

Use It to:

Enumerate how many people live within a certain radius
See which counties are the largest and/or the fastest growing
Quickly learn the size of the labor force and unemployment rate ranges of the counties in the radius
Determine which industry sectors are among the largest in the radius

How to Use It:

It’s easy—just type in the name of a city or county and use the “autofill” to choose the center point of the radius. Then use the slider to increase or decrease the radius (minimum is 50 miles).

Statistical Abstracts

Statistical Abstract of the United States

The Statistical Abstract of the United States,published since 1878, is the authoritative and comprehensive summary of statistics on the social, political, and economic organization of the United States. Abstracts for 1878 through 2012 are available at the US Census website (link above.)

Use the Abstract as a convenient volume for statistical reference, and as a guide to additional resources.

The 2012 Edition was the last edition published by the US Government. Since 2013 the Statistical Abstract of the United States has been published by ProQuest.

Selected print copies from the 1960's through the current year are available in the Reference section of the Morgan Library:

REF

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