About the Surprises in Growth and Explanation of Actual - Expected

 The best way to make sense of findings from Census 2000 is to compare them with what was initially expected.  Otherwise we may only recite a series of well-known truisms: California is growing, more in the smaller and outlying counties; also, Asians are growing faster than Latinos, Latinos faster than blacks and whites, etc.

The series of graphs in this section are organized in pairs, first showing the actual percentage growth in each county, followed by a graph that illustrates the difference between the actual growth rate and the growth rate as previously projected.

Note on method: Those previous projections are drawn from the State of California’s Demographic Research Unit in the Department of Finance, which prepares the official projections for the state. We defined our racial groups to match the definitions used by the Department of Finance.  Among the variations described in the Overlap user guide, this is version A4, an Hispanic dominant version with multiracials fractionally allocated in equal shares to the component races [Section 7 of Overlap] (PDF file). A small temporal discrepancy should be noted: the actual census growth is from April 1, 1990 to April 1, 2000, while the projected growth was from April 1, 1990 to July 1, 2000. Accordingly, the expected growth was for a period 3 months longer in time, the actual growth should be slightly lower than what was projected.

As an illustration of how to read the graphs, Latinos or Hispanics increased by 82% in Riverside County between 1990 and 2000, but were forecast to grow by 54%. Hence, the difference between actual and expected growth rates is positive 28 percentage points. That is very surprising. Conversely, in the same county, the growth of non-Hispanic whites was 16 percentage points lower than expected.

Reviewing all the graphs shows where in the state growth of a group was fastest (or slowest) and how much that growth exceeded expectations. There are many surprises in the state.

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