DOI: 10.57761/aw9b-jd83
title: The Opportunity Atlas

description: The Opportunity Atlas has collected contextual data by county and tract. Rather than providing contextual socioeconomic data of where people currently live, the data represents average socioeconomic indicators (e.g., earnings) of where people grew up.
description: #Documentation  
A core element of Population Health Science is that health outcomes can only be fully understood when they are studied within their context. Therefore, we have a copy of The Opportunity Atlas, a dataset that provides socioeconomic data by county and tract.



[Several studies](<http://opportunityinsights.org/paper/the-effects-of-neighborhoods-on-intergenerational-mobility-i-childhood-exposure-effects>) have shown that especially childhood neighborhoods drive adult outcomes and that residential areas lived in through adulthood have much smaller effects. The focus of the Opportunity Atlas is therefore on contextual data of where people grew up:



> Traditional measures of poverty and neighborhood conditions provide snapshots of income and other variables for residents in an area at a given point in time. But to study how economic *opportunity* varies across neighborhoods, we really need to follow people over many years and see how one’s outcomes depend upon family circumstances and where on grew up. The Opportunity Atlas is the first dataset that provides such longitudinal information at a detailed neighborhood level. Using the Atlas, you can see not just where the rich and poor currently live – which was possible in previously available data from the Census Bureau – but whether children in a given area tend to grow up to become rich of poor. This focus on mobility out of poverty across generations allows us to trace the roots of outcomes such as poverty and incarceration back to where kids grew up, potentially permitting much more effective interventions.



As such, The Opportunity Atlas data provides a rich source of data for researchers who wish to overlay health data with contextual data.



**Methodology**

Three sources of Census Bureau are linked to compute the data

1. The 2000 and 2010 Decennial Census short form
2. Federal income tax returns for 1989, 1994, 1995, 1998-2015
3. The 2000 Decennial Census long form and the 2005-2015 American Community Surveys (ACS). 

<!-- -->

20\.5 million Americans born between 1987-1983 are sampled from these data and mapped back to the Census tracts they lived in through age 23. After that step, a range of outcomes are then estimated for each of the 70,000 tracts. In order to comply with federal data disclosure standards and protect the privacy of individuals no estimates in tracts with 20 or fewer children are published and noise (small random numbers) is added to all the estimates.



For more information on the data collection and methodology, please visit:

[Website](<https://www.opportunityatlas.org/>)

[Documentation](<https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Atlas_methods.pdf>)



**Data availability**

Some variables are available for counties only. The table below gives you an overview. Open the table in a new tab for a larger view.



![data availability.png](<https://redivis.com/fileUploads/ee6544ef-e1b1-473d-a75d-36618c91f4a5>)