From here to there: Methods of allocating data between census geography and socially meaningful areas

Sociologists often need to reassign data from one set of geographic areas (called source units) to another set of geographic areas (called target units) in cases where the two zonal systems are spatially incongruent. Although geographers have developed a variety of interpolation techniques to address the challenge of reallocating data across misaligned geography, there has been limited use of these methods in sociological research. As a result of the scant use of interpolation methods by researchers, the accuracy of these methods has not been assessed adequately with empirical data typically encountered by sociologists. To address this shortcoming, the authors describe four ways of reassigning data across incompatible zonal systems and test the accuracy of each approach with two case studies. The first example reassigns racial data from block groups to school attendance boundaries for selected school systems and the second reassigns racial data from school districts to Public Use Micro Areas for the entire US.