LAS 100 Research Project

Social Cooperation

How to look up information about the neighborhood of each store. (You can follow similar steps to look up the characteristics of your home, if you like.)

For the purposes of this project, a neighborhood will be defined as a "census tract", one of a series of areas defined by the Census Bureau that contain approximately 4000 people. Each metropolitan area, e.g., the greater Chicago area, is divided up into a large number of such tracts.

To begin you will need to connect to Netscape (or some other internet browser). How you proceed depends on whether you have an exact address for each store or the name of two nearby intersecting streets. For purposes of illustration I will use the example of a White Hen Pantry near the corner of Halsted and VanBuren in Chicago (just across the expressway from UIC).

• To begin access the class Website at http://www.uic.edu/classes/las/las100wb



• If you have an exact address proceed to step 3. If not, scroll down to the Research Project Info section of the webpage and click on "Click Here to Look Up Addresses"

When the screen comes up click the tag for "Yellow Pages" near the top of the screen. Enter the appropriate name in the blank under "Business Name". Type the intersection in the box for street address and the name of the town or city in which it is found. Click "Yellow Pages". In the example, I typed "White Hen" for the business name and Halsted and Van Buren for the street address and Chicago, IL for the city and state. Click on SEARCH.

A map appears on the right hand side of the screen, and a list of matching businesses underneath. Usually, the first listed place is the one that you are looking for. Write down the address and proceed to step 3. In this example the address is 833 West VanBuren (For 7-11 stores 7 Eleven usually works best).

3. When you have an address, return to the class Website and scroll down to "Click here to get census tract numbers". (Or http://www.geocode.com/eagle.html-ssi)

You should see a screen that says TRY AN ADDRESS.

Enter the street address in the boxes provided on the right and blank out the zip code field. Highlight ADDRESS INFO and click REQUEST.

4. When the next screen comes up write down the following information.

Latitude and Longitude

FIPS County

and Tract Number

Lat: 41.876450 Lon: -087.648372

FIPS County IL031

Tract. 282100 (Note that the first five characters of the tract number repeat the county code and there is an implied decimal place before the last two digits. Number IL031282100 is really 2821.00

4. Repeat these steps for each store you want to look up.

5. Now you are ready to look up the characteristics of each census tract. Return to the class Website and go to "Click Here to Get Census Info" (Or type http://homer.ssd.census.gov/cdrom/lookup)

6. On the first screen, scroll down and click on STF3A. (It should have a RED DOT next to it.)

7. On the next screen, go to the box under United States and highlight Illinois (or a different state if that is where you are.) Select "Go to level State--County". Click the submit box.

8. On the next screen, go to the box under Illinois and highlight the county Cook (or a different county if that is where you are.) Select "Go to level State--County--Census Tract". Click the submit box.

9. On the next screen, go to the box under Cook County and highlight the Census Tract number from step 3. Hold down the control key and you can select multiple tract numbers. Select "Retrieve the areas you've selected below". Click the submit box.

10. On the next screen select "Choose TABLES to retrieve" and click submit.

11. You must now select the data you want to have about each area. It is very important that you select the proper boxes so that your choices will be consistent with the format for the entire class. Click on the little square boxes next to:

12. Scroll back to the top of the screen and click submit. The next screen should say a few lines from the top "Retrieve the 11 tables you have selected." If it lists a different number go back and correct your selections. The first time you do this, choose HTML format, so that you can see what the characteristics of your area are. Click submit.

13. After you have had a chance to inspect your results you need to return to the previous screen to save the data in a more useful format. Click "back" on your browser and select "Tab Delimited format" Click submit.

14. The same data will appear but now it is strung out across the top of the page. Go to File and click save as. Save the output to your A-drive (if you have a floppy diskette handy) or the C-drive root directory under the default name.