Add ZCTA as region?

[SoccerGeek]

Is it possible to use ZCTA, or zip code, as a region for the census_geo argument? I work in an environment where getting tract level specificity is difficult but we can use 5 digit zip code to ZCTA cross walks to use ZCTA and Census data.

thanks for the package.

[1beb]

ZCTA is kind of a nightmare to work with because of the rural/urban divide. There's no plan that I'm aware of to add it. What other geographic variables do you have available?

[mrhumanzee]

Good news, there is an extension for wru which does exactly what you want.
https://github.com/jcuriel-unc/zipWRUext

Here is the paper which introduces the extension.
Clark, J., Curiel, J., & Steelman, T. (2022). Minmaxing of Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding and Geography Level Ups in Predicting Race. Political Analysis, 30(3), 456-462. doi:10.1017/pan.2021.31

[1beb]

This is now part of WRU dev branch and will be released to CRAN with 3.0. See #120