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Help[Facts] Best source for US given name popularities? Project help needed
Hi All,
I'm doing a statistics project for school and I'll be comparing the popularities of given names throughout a full year in the nation, my home state and my region. The latter data I'm getting from birth announcements from the local paper, and I was thinking of using the US Social Security data for the national and state information. This seems to be reliable even if it's only based on 1% of the total births. What I don't like about it is that it seperates different spellings of the same name(Lily, Lilly, etc) as different names and ranks them accordingly, so there's an error involved based on spelling. But I could use the same guidelines on the local info just to keep everything equal, even though I'd rather not. It looks like the most recent data I'll be able to use is from 2006 as they don't issue the yearly popularity info until Mother's Day in May. I couldn't find much on the US census page to help out.
Any other ideas, or do you think this is the best solution?
Tempestgirl
I'm doing a statistics project for school and I'll be comparing the popularities of given names throughout a full year in the nation, my home state and my region. The latter data I'm getting from birth announcements from the local paper, and I was thinking of using the US Social Security data for the national and state information. This seems to be reliable even if it's only based on 1% of the total births. What I don't like about it is that it seperates different spellings of the same name(Lily, Lilly, etc) as different names and ranks them accordingly, so there's an error involved based on spelling. But I could use the same guidelines on the local info just to keep everything equal, even though I'd rather not. It looks like the most recent data I'll be able to use is from 2006 as they don't issue the yearly popularity info until Mother's Day in May. I couldn't find much on the US census page to help out.
Any other ideas, or do you think this is the best solution?
Tempestgirl
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