You'll find some "best bets" for finding demographic and health statistics below. You'll probably save yourself some time by searching these first. But if you can't still find the information you're looking for, see what you can find by searching Google.
These tips will help you do a more effective Google search:
- Look for sites that end in .gov. City and town websites have lots of local demographic and health information.
- If you find a .org site, look into the organization. Would they have any reason to present biased information?
- Look for reports, overviews, and snapshots when you're looking for quick facts. You'll need a lot of time (and probably some advanced tools and knowledge) to find the information you want in a data set.
- If you find a source that cites data from somewhere else, try to find the original source.
- Pay attention to when data was collected. A report published this year could cite data that's much older.