Synthetic annual place-level estimates of language use at home and educational attainment for American Indian and Alaska Native individuals in rural Alaska, 2000 - 2015

The American Community Survey (ACS) replaced the United States (US) Census Long Form Survey after 2000 as the only systematic source of community-level information on the American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) population living in rural Alaska communities. We define rural Alaska as the region corresponding to Census Public Use Microdata Area (PUMA) 400, known also as the Subsistence Alaska PUMA. The ACS is an annual survey. However, due to small sample sizes, the ACS publishes estimates for places and census areas/boroughs only as five-year moving averages. Even with the averaging over five years, estimates of educational attainment and language use vary substantially over time in many communities, and high margins of error make it difficult to distinguish communities from each other. Using individual Census and ACS records accessed through the Census Research Data Center program, we generated annual synthetic estimates of language use at home and two measures of educational attainment -- high school graduation and college degree -- based on logistic regressions estimated with data on individuals indicating AIAN identity, either alone or in combination with other races. The equations were estimated under the assumption that language and education change gradually at the community level, and that variations from year to year are associated with sample variation in basic characteristics of the population such as age and gender that can be benchmarked with precision to the 2000 and 2010 census counts. The synthetic estimates remove the variation associated with interannual survey age and gender variation, resulting in a smaller margin of error for the smoothed estimates than in the original sample means. They also include interpolated values for years 2001 through 2004 when no survey data were collected.