About us
We help people make sense of their communities
Where is North Carolina heading?
Carolina Demography is made up of demographic researchers, evaluators, spatial analysts, coders, designers, and storytellers. Together, we provide people with the data and analysis they need to make sense of population-level changes.
Collectively, we have decades of experience making population estimates and forecasts, analyzing population-level and economic trends, and communicating that data back out into the world in a way that’s easy to understand and act upon. Our work informs decision-making, evaluation, and policy across North Carolina, where we serve organizations and people in all 100 counties.
We are fortunate to be housed within the Carolina Population Center (CPC), one of the oldest and most distinguished population centers in the country. It was Paul Voss, then the interim director of CPC, who proposed building an applied demography unit within the center in 2012.
Modeled after the Applied Population Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the vision for Carolina Demography was to help people and organizations across NC better understand the dynamic and rapidly changing state. UNC’s Office of Research provided seed money to fund the research consulting unit for six months.
Rebecca Tippett, Carolina Demography’s founding director, joined CPC in 2013. Working closely with CPC’s leadership, she began meeting with local and state government officials, businesses, non-for-profit organizations, and people across the state to understand what questions they had about their rapidly changing population. Early projects included population projections and delivering presentations on migration patterns across NC.
Today, Carolina Demography has grown to a team of seven and continues to take on projects that help people better understand the implications of demographic change across the state of NC.
Carolina Demography has several initiatives that assist journalists in using Census data and other data sets. Our staff:
In 2010, just over three of every four North Carolina households mailed back their census forms (76%), a seven percentage point increase in mail participation compared to 2000 (69%). Higher participation rates reduce the overall costs of conducting the census. And, when…
A local business owner needed to convince a popular franchise’s parent organization that local residents in a rural NC county would frequent his shop. But he faced a challenge: On paper, the rural county is sparsely populated, with many household…
The North Carolina Community College System (NCCCS) is a major provider of education and training to North Carolina workers and plays a critical role in helping North Carolina ensure sufficient levels of education and training to remain competitive in the…
