Usability Tests
Test Questions for the Historical Census Browser Web Site
http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/php/
1. What published volume of the Census was used to get the data for "total females" in 1880?
2. Can you find information about any of your specific ancestors on the site?
3. Can you find the total number of males in Baldwin Co., Alabama, across a number of census editions, such as from 1820 to 1960?
4. Can you find values for multiple categories of data over time for any state you choose, for all years available? An example might be total population, total number of farms, and total native-born white males for all years available from 1790 to 1960 for Connecticut.
5. Find the proportion of males in the total population for each state in 1870. Can you map these results for the US by state? If you then limit your results to a single state, can you sort the resulting data in descending order by the value?
6. Make a map of the US by state displaying the ratio of African American males to the total population in 1960. Can you change the display to Equal Count to see a difference in the display of the categories? Can you go then back to the same data window and instead display a map of only the total number of African American males?
7. How would you cite data retrieved from the Historical Census Browser in your research project?
8. Where might you find information about how the Census was taken in a particular year?
9. Can you find links to other census resources for data that are not available on this site?
10. How would get access to the original datasets if you wanted to do some statistical analysis on a large portion of the
data?
Any other comments?
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