Home internet access in Louisville improving

June 9, 2020

Overall

This report uses census Microdata from IPUMS to look at internet access in the Louisville MSA. Data is available from 2013 to 2018. Louisville ranks towards the bottom of our peer cities in percent of people with home internet access, although the differences among the cities are relatively small (The top city, Grand Rapids, is only 4 percentage points ahead of Louisville).

History

Louisville has increased its internet access over time, including a large jump in 2016. (We do not currently have an explanation for this jump, so if you know of something that happened in that time period let us know). In the past few years access has leveled off at just above 90 percent of the population

Poverty

There is an access gap between poor and nonpoor individuals in having internet access at home, although this gap has shrunk a little as overall access has increased.

Race

We also see a gap between Black and White households although this has closed dramatically since 2014.

Age

Finally, we see an age related gap, as individuals over the age of 65 are much less likely to be in a household with internet access.

Devices

  • 80% of Louisville households have a computer in thier household, unlike internet access this is down a little bit from 2013 (82%).
  • 69% have a tablet in their household.
  • 85% have either a computer or a tablet.
  • 89% of households have a smartphone.
  • 94% have either a smartphone or internet access at home.

JCPS additional capacity

As schools transitioned to being online, JCPS distibuted:

  • 20,833 Chromebooks
  • 517 Hotspots

This is not a large enough distribution to change our standing relative to peer cities, but it does increase internet access among JCPS students.

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Natural Breaks Algorithm

For each indicator, Greater Louisville Project assigns cities into one of three groups (high-performing, middle-of-the-pack, and low-performing) based on how they compare to other cities. The assignment is based on how cities naturally cluster on that indicator. Sometimes, the differences between cities are very small, and the difference between a city ranked 5th and 6th could simply be a matter of the sampling error that arises from using survey data. Thus, rather than always make a division that declares the top 5 to be the top tier, we use a natural breaks algorithm to look for a cluster of cities that is outperforming the rest, a cluster that is about average, and a cluster that is lagging. This clustering gives us a better indication of where Louisville is thriving and where Louisville has room to learn from cities that are doing better.

Z-Scores

Z-scores (or standardization) is a way to combine data with different units of measurement into a single index. The z-score is a measure of how far away a city (or census tract, etc.) is from the average city. In order to be comparable across different units of measurement, the z-score is the distance from the mean measured in standard deviations (e.g. if Louisville has a z-score of 1 it means Louisville is 1 standard deviation above the mean of its peer cities).

Data from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's County Health Rankings use z-scores and all z-scores are relative to the mean of Louisville's peer cities. (On the County Health Rankings site z-scores are relative to all the counties in each state - thus z-scores reported by GLP will be different, because we are using a different reference group). The Greater Louisville Project also uses z-scores in our multidimensional poverty index, which compares each census tract to the mean of all census tracts in Louisville.