Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s blog. This week we will discuss how to create and utilize filters for your research.

Why Use a Filter?

Filters are a great way to identify target areas that meet multiple conditions.

Use Case

You want to identify areas of San Antonio to market your afterschool program that is aimed towards low income and low educational attainment areas. You can use a data filter to help find the target areas.

Example

First, we will identify the target areas by creating an income filter and mapping the education attainment variable. Let’s get started.

1.Create the project by entering the target location for analysis in the Location field. In this example, the city of San Antonio, TX.

2. Map the variable % Education, College, Masters or Doctorate Degree. This is one of the 3 default data variables available when creating a project.

The darker areas of the map represent highly educated areas whereas the lighter areas reflect areas where a smaller percentage of residents have a college degree.

Next, create the income data filter.

3. Select Filtering from the top Right of the interface. This will bring up the filter menu.
4. Select a variable to act as a condition, in this example we want the Median Income variable.
5. Enter a value for the condition (less than $35,000) and select Apply.

The filter gets applied to your map.

The final map image above reveals Census Tracts that meet our income criteria - looking at the still visible mapped areas provides the user with some ideal locations to market their program to.
That’s it for this week’s report! Stay tuned for more SimplyAnalytics how-tos and tips and send us your questions at support@simplyanalytics.com. If we feature your question in a future blog post, we’ll treat you to a $10 Starbucks gift card!