Guide to the
2002 Economic Census

2002 Economic Census on American FactFinder®

American FactFinder (AFF) is a database system that gives you access to the same Economic Census data that are also published in PDF. The advantage with FactFinder is that you can search directly for the data you want, can display data for all available sectors at once, and can download the results for further manipulation.  AFF also provides access to all of the data published on DVD-ROM.

Creating a Map

American FactFinder supports the display of maps showing states within the nation, metropolitan and micropolitan areas (MSAs) within the nation, and MSAs within a state. County-within-state maps or county-within-US maps are not currently supported for 2002, although they are available for 1997.

Maps may be created for any one of 12 predefined variables, for any one of the 18 sectors. --

• Establishments
  • Total
  • Number per 1,000 persons
• Sales, receipts, revenue or value of shipments
  • Total
  • Value per capita
  • Value per establishment
  • Value per employee
• Annual payroll
  • Total
  • Average payroll per employee
• Employees
  • Total
  • Number of employees per 1,000 persons

Locate the Maps section at the bottom of the AFF main page.

1. Click on the "Thematic Maps".

2. The default map is for persons per square mile from the 2000 Census of Population and Housing. To get to Economic Census maps, put your cursor over "Change Selections" to reveal the drop-down menu, then click on "Data Set".

3. Under "Economic Censuses and Surveys", click on "All sectors: Economic-Wide Key Statistics: 1997", then click the "Next" button.

4. Under "Select a geographic type" select "Nation" ("State" is the default), then click on "United States" in the next box to confirm that selection, and click on the "Next" button.

5. Scroll down through the four variables and all of the sector iterations of each variable, which are presented in alphabetic order, not the usual NAICS sequence. Select the desired theme, then click the "Show Map" button.

6. American Factfinder also supports county-level mapping. You can change click on the drop-down menu under the title that by default says "State" and click on "County". At this point you need to be patient, since dealing with so many more geographic areas will take more time in FactFinder.

Note: Areas shown in gray have no values, either because there were fewer than 500 manufacturing employees in the county or because data were withheld to avoid disclosure.

7. Click on the radio button to "recenter and zoom in", then click on the area of the map you want to make the center. In this illustration, we have clicked in the Indiana area.

Another way to zoom in is to select one of the numbers on the right. But anything below 7 is unlikely to be appropriate to show multi-county areas.

8. Click on the (8) button.

FactFinder's default is to show major highways and highway labels at this scale. Control for all features within the map is accessed via the "Legend" link at the left.

9. Click on "Legend".

On the legend screen are several tabs. The default tab allows us to change the number of class intervals, the color scheme, and even allows specification of user-defined intervals.

10. Change the number of classes to 7, then click on the "Features" tab.

11. In the Label column, click in the box next to "Major Road" to remove check mark. This will delete the highway labels. Don't worry about the checkmarks for streets and streams, since these do not display at this resolution. Click on the "Title" tab.

The default title is "Value of Shipments/Sales/Receipts per Capita for Manufacturing, United States", unnecessarily wordy, particulary because only value of shipments is recorded for manufacturing, not sales or receipts.

12. Simplify the title, and click on the "Update" button. If you were to cancel or close the window without updating, none of the changes entered would take effect.

The final map shows counties in a multi-state area. If you were interested in only in counties in a single state, you could have specified that back in step 4 and gotten much faster processing from FactFinder.