Blog

4.15.15

Government offers stream of information through Data Ferrett

When you are on the search for relevant data, maybe it just helps to have a small animal with you. Here at Evolve Research, we have our mascot Gladwell. At the US Census, they’ve created one of their own - the Data Ferrett.

What’s the Data Ferrett? Well, actually, it’s quite helpful, since it gives marketers and other researchers an opportunity to dig deep into the demographic information offered by the government and use it in some very strategic ways.

For an organization looking to find a representative sample of the population to survey, tools like this which uncover the information of who makes up a city, state or region can be helpful - with the data available in different categories - users can select from several surveys including American Community Survey; American Housing Survey; Consumer Expenditures; County Business Patterns, Current Population and others - and is kept relevant with monthly updates to the Current Population Survey.

Blogs like Web Surveys by Cvent point out that Data Ferrett’s tools ensure a quality representation when data scientists, marketers and others are looking for a quality sampling. 

“Tools such as Data Ferrett allow us to match our intuition with what the US Census shows as a picture of the nation. The tool is Internet base and allows us to tap into data from many of the Census Bureau’s separate surveys,” Cvent wrote here. “Researchers can select from any of the variables in the available surveys. The tool makes use of SQL and allows the user to create new variables through re-coding. For example if our study focuses on a narrow age range we can modify the tabled variable to match the range of interest. Finally the user has the option of building a table with either raw counts or percentages. The figures that come from Data Ferrett can be plugged directly into any sampling system.”