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This paper investigates how ancillary geographic data – in particular, information on land or assessor parcels – might be used to improve estimates for small area populations and population characteristics. It seeks to determine whether parcel land use codes can be used to reliably replicate population and housing distributions within small (subcounty) areas and whether other parcel attributes – in addition to land use – exhibit any explanatory power in replicating population and housing characteristics within these same places. The basis for this paper was Professor Barbara Buttenfield's service on the Census Scientific Advisory Committee, in which her working group explored the utility of administrative source data as an alternative or complement to federal survey data. This analysis highlights some of the benefits and complications of the incorporation of parcel data into geodemographic estimation, and the findings demonstrate that such a use is problematic but encouraging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article is the first empirical investigation of attitudes towards immigration in Europe via small area estimation providing reliable regional estimates across European regions. Four dimensions of regional attitudes are considered, i.e., restrictive attitudes towards specific groups, restrictive attitudes towards acquired criteria, threat, and restrictive attitudes towards ascribed criteria. We produce maps of these, as well as validation outputs, demonstrating that our estimates are reliable, hence, have a strong potential in informing policy makers. We show that, although there is a large between-country variation of these attitudes, there are also large spatial differences between-region in some countries. Overall, Swedish public attitudes tend to be quite homogeneous across regions, and located towards the positive side, whereas Eastern European countries tend to show negative attitudes across all the dimensions apart from the acquired criteria. However, in these countries, we can see larger spatial differences across regions, especially in the ascribed criteria and attitudes towards specific groups indicator. In general, the threat dimension does not show a large between-region variability, compared to the other three dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]