Longitudinal Social Vulnerability Data Exploration for Harris County Census Tracts

Pre-existing social and economic conditions can facilitate or limit a neighborhood’s access to resources, policy making processes, and ability to reap benefits from policy outcomes (McDermott et al., 2013; Beatley, 1989). Extensive research has shown that socially vulnerable populations (ex: minority, elderly, single parent households, households without vehicular access) face more loss during floods and bore longer recovery periods (Peacock et al.,2014; Van Zandt et al., 2012). Thus, while developing policies to address vulnerability to flooding, a critical first step is to assess current and historic social vulnerability conditions in affected areas.
The goal of this project is to create a workflow that would enable researchers to automate this assessment. We use publicly available census tract level social vulnerability data for 2016, 2010 and 2000 in Texas from the Centers for Disease Control. This workflow uses STATA program to first download social vulnerability data. Next, we clean and append data files to facilitate statistical analysis. Finally, we use mapping tools to explore the data set. The resulting CSV data file can be used for longitudinal analysis of social vulnerability data in Texas census tracts from 2000 to 2016.