Population Change In The United States of America
Oftentimes you may look around at your local neighborhood or surrounding community and see that a ton of houses, apartments, and other living spaces are being built. Since urban sprawl began it has been very interesting to look at the way the cities have spread out and the way that the population has been changing across the United States of America. With all of this population change, could there be serious economic, political, and societal implications? For example, there could not be enough public services, like buses and garbage men to handle a city's new needs. Or not even enough houses for everyone to have a space to properly live.
To answer this question data needs to be pulled with the yearly United States population over multiple years. To collect this data there were many necessary steps but it began first with accessing a site that had data on the United States of America. The API came from a website called datausa.io and contained the proper information to conduct this report. After that, the data needed to be imported into Python. Luckily the data that was found was a JSON file and with that, we used the request library in Python to import the data. The data was imported by using the get method and then was specified for certain years from 2016 to 2020. It was necessary to make sure that the data was specified since it went back all the way to 2003 but something more modern was the subject of this study. Since the data was in a JSON file it was easily able to be parsed. After that two counters were initialized a total population change counter and the previous population change counter. Then for each of the five years, the data was sorted through and the year and the population were declared. Then the population total for each year was compared to get the total population change. Once the total population change was acquired that number was then divided by 5 to get the average population change per year which was 1,602,229 people. During the 5 years, the biggest population increase was between 2018–2019 and it consists of approximately 1,871,514 new US citizens.
When cleaning up this data the main thing was limiting the number of years that were accessed. If the timeline were more than five years there would be a drastic difference between 2003 and 2020 because of the exponential rate at which people are growing. To clean the data only five years were used to get a more accurate representation of the population increase. The data set could be limited because it only looks at the past five years but doing so creates a more accurate representation of the population change. The data is also limited because it only looks at the United States population and not the whole globe. The human population could be decreasing but in the United States, the data says that the population is increasing but that could be just more people moving to America as immigrants and becoming legal citizens not more people being born. This data also doesn’t account for anyone who is illegally here in the United States of America.
This exploratory analysis uses an API that involves the United States population numbers and looks at an average across five years from this it can be concluded that the United States population is most likely increasing. From this, there could be serious economic, political, and societal implications if the correct actions are not taken.
https://github.com/Galbers2/INST414/blob/main/Assingment1.ipynb Here is a link to my GitHub repository with the code and results!
