Title: Counting America's Youth: Easy Access to Population Data Series: Fact Sheet Author: Howard N. Snyder Published: October 2000 Subject: Juvenile justice-general 3 pages 4,000 bytes ------------------ Figures, charts, forms, and tables are not included in this ASCII plain-text file. To view this document in its entirety, download the Adobe Acrobat graphic file available from this Web site or order a print copy from NCJRS at 800-638-8736. ------------------ Counting America's Youth: Easy Access to Population Data by Howard N. Snyder Easy Access to Juvenile Populations is a new online interactive data dissemination tool that provides demographic information about juveniles for States and counties. It was designed for the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) by the National Center for Juvenile Justice (NCJJ) in Pittsburgh, PA. A component of OJJDP's Statistical Briefing Book found on the OJJDP Web site (www.ojjdp.ncjrs.org/ojstatbb/), the data site enables users to view, print, and download juvenile population estimates according to age, gender, race, and Hispanic ethnicity. This information has not been widely available in the past because printed population reports usually do not provide this level of detail and many electronic population data files are inaccessible and difficult to use. Based on estimates developed by the U.S. Bureau of the Census, Easy Access to Juvenile Populations provides detailed tables of population estimates for 1990 and 1998 for the entire United States, each State, and each of the Nation's 3,141 counties. The detail provided in these tables will help meet most of the population information needs of juvenile justice practitioners. The tables provide estimates for several age groups--0 to 5, 6 to 9, 10 to 12, and 13 to 14--and for the individual ages of 15, 16, and 17. The tables also provide age groupings pertinent to juvenile justice issues, including ages 0 to 17 and 10 to 17. Because States vary in their upper age of original juvenile court jurisdiction, Easy Access to Juvenile Populations presents population groupings that incorporate this feature for each State. The population groupings are consistent with those used in the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reporting Program, which allows users to produce county-level and State-level arrest rates. The age groups are further subdivided by gender, race (white, black, Native American, Asian), and Hispanic ethnicity. With the click of a button, a displayed table can be converted to a printer-friendly format and then printed. This format removes the Web navigation icons from the screen display and produces a more cleanly formatted document. To capture the contents of the table in a spreadsheet format for additional manipulations, users can select the "data export" button to create a tab-delimited file that can be saved and stored electronically. To ensure that Easy Access to Juvenile Populations always displays the most current juvenile population data available, NCJJ will update population estimates as new data become available. --------------- For further information National Center for Juvenile Justice 710 Fifth Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15219-3000 412-227-6950 Howard N. Snyder is the Director of Systems Research at NCJJ. Easy Access to Juvenile Populations and this Fact Sheet were prepared as part of OJJDP's National Juvenile Justice Data Analysis Project. ---------------- The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention is a component of the Office of Justice Programs, which also includes the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Institute of Justice, and the Office for Victims of Crime. ----------------- FS-200014