The following visualization explores poverty levels in Connecticut by township; as well as by educational attainment. The data is provided by the US Census Bureau through the American Community Survey 2015 5-year estimates (2011-2015). My goal in assessing this data was to observe trends of poverty in Connecticut, as it relates to education level, location, and gender. Through the visualization it can be observed that the highest pockets of poverty are found in Bridgeport, Hartford, New Haven and Waterbury. These cities have the largest populations in the state which also correlates to the largest numbers of poverty. There was a large discrepancy in poverty rates, in the category of gender. Females had a greater instance of poverty at 60% compared to males at 40%. In the category of education, individuals whose highest level of education was a high school diploma were found to have the highest occurrence of poverty. Contrary to popular belief, people who have some college/associates degree were in many cases, just as likely to be living in poverty as people who earned less than a high school degree.

The most effective way to utilize this dashboard is to view it for statewide trends or town data. If you are looking for information on a particular town in Connecticut, select that town in the table on the right. By selecting the town, the other charts and map will be updated to reflect information only for this town. If you would like to look at multiple towns at once you can select more than one by holding the control key (Windows) or command key (Mac) and selecting the additional town(s). It is important to note that by comparing multiple towns, the statistics will be a sum of all towns included.

Data Source:
https://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/15_5YR/B17003/0400000US09.06000

[xyz-ihs snippet=”Poverty-in-cT-by-ed-attainment”]