2014 Urban Affairs Association Conference

Surveys such as the American Community Survey, undertaken by the U.S. Census Bureau, produce statistics that are often mapped. A key characteristic of these statistics is that they are estimates of a quantity rather than actual, true counts. This means that there is some uncertainty in how well the estimate reflects the true value of the statistic. Although the Census Bureau publishes information about the uncertainty in the statistics, not everyone consults these tables. This research works towards developing methods for including uncertainty information directly in maps of statistics from surveys like the American Community Survey. That way, users of these statistics can easily see the uncertainty in the statistics and consider how it affects decisions they make based upon the mapped statistics.  In this poster, we present findings from interviews and surveys with urban planning students in Portland to highlight their response to reading/interpreting maps for various decision-driven scenarios.  These findings will prove critical for our next stage of the research, which involves investigating the effectiveness of different visualization techniques designed to communicate that uncertainty to professional planners.