Of course, the greatest advantage to the availability and use of these large datasets is the detail and accuracy of the estimates which can be obtained from them. Income Distribution . . . The Census Bureau measures income as pre-tax monies received. Income can be measured, analyzed, and reported for individual persons , for families , and for households . Households are the aggregate of individual persons living in a single housing unit.
Households can be family or non-family households, and can contain more than one family.
Persons in group quarters are counted as individual households. Detailed definitions of these terms can be found published on the Census Bureau s web site. The distribution of characteristics in a population is typically represented by a frequency curve . Values of the characteristic of interest are plotted on a horizontal axis and their frequency of occurrence in the population is plotted on a vertical axis. In a characteristic distribution, values have a tendency to cluster around their center.