James Howard's Research Log

Recoding County-Level Data

This evening I finished recoding a list of grants from FEMA for Flood Mitigation Assistance. This dataset contains 2108 entries, and contains the following columns, among others:

Because many of the subgrantee fields are filled even when the county is not and most of the subgrantees are local government agencies, I tried to recode the counties according to FIPS 6-4, “Counties and Equivalent Entities of the United States, Its Possessions, and Associated Areas.” Local governments were recoded to their parent counties, as appropriate.

Going through this process by hand, I have some observations on the first-order divisions of states:

1. There are five townships in Ohio with the name Scioto.
2. There are two counties named Jeff Davis, one named Jefferson Davis, and a parish in Louisiana named Jefferson Davis.
3. There are seven counties in the United States named Howard County.
4. A remarkable number of states have cities and counties with the same name, but which are not near each other.