How a guide is made
A guide is only worth paying for if you can trust it in front of your elders. This page says where every part comes from, what is checked, and what a guide cannot tell you.
The sources
- People, households, income, and housing. The Census Bureau's American Community Survey, five-year estimates, by census tract. The Bureau releases a new set each December.
- School district lines. The Census Bureau's school district boundary files, which states review with the Bureau.
- Schools and enrollment. The Common Core of Data and the Private School Universe Survey, both from the National Center for Education Statistics.
- The schools zoned for your address. Your district's own published attendance boundaries, read for your address and named in the guide.
- Roads, parks, neighborhoods, and churches. OpenStreetMap, a public map that volunteers maintain.
How a circle becomes a number
The Census Bureau publishes survey estimates for census tracts, and a three mile circle cuts through tracts. The 2020 Census counted every person by census block, and blocks are far smaller than tracts. A guide adds up the blocks inside your circle to learn what share of each tract lives there, then scales the tract's estimates by that share.
Margins of error are combined the way the Census Bureau instructs. When a margin is wide compared with its number, the guide marks the figure as soft.
What is checked before anything is written
- The county totals worked out by our method must match the totals the Census Bureau publishes for that county.
- Our median income and median age for the county must land within a few percent of the published medians.
- The survey population inside the main ring must be plausible beside the 2020 count for the same blocks.
- Every census tract in the circle must have data, and the address must sit inside a school district.
A guide that fails a check is not written until the cause is found. The checks and their results are printed on the last page of every guide.
How the words are written
The text of a guide is written from the checked data for your address and nothing else. Every number in a sentence is filled in from that data, so the words and the tables cannot disagree. A guide that names a figure its data does not hold cannot be published.
What a guide cannot tell you
- It cannot tell you where one family's children attend school. District lines are irregular. Check an address with the district.
- It does not count church attendance or measure anyone's faith. No public source does that for a neighborhood.
- Its list of churches comes from a volunteer map, so it misses some and may show one that has closed. Tell us and we correct your guide.
- It describes the people who live near the building. It cannot describe the people who drive past it.
If something is wrong
Write to hello@churchfieldguide.app. We correct the guide and tell you what changed. If the guide is no use to you, the refund promise applies.