LEP Data by Income for MA Legal Services Service Areas

At the request of the Language Access Coalition, the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) compiled data on limited English proficient (LEP) individuals and linguistically isolated families that live below a certain level of poverty.  The data also include age and language spoken of these populations. For this data, LEP is defined as an individual who speaks English "less than very well", based on US Census definitions this includes speaking English, "well", "not well" and "not at all", the raw data compiled by the BRA is attached or can be accessed here.  (The BRA also compiled data using the definition of LEP as "less than well", click here to access it).

The Language Access Coalition broke down the data into the geographies covered by each legal service area (all attached). In each Excel file, there are multiple tabs, the "Service Area Total" tab shows the totals of Limited English Proficient Individuals and Linguistically Isolated Households in the PUMAs within each service area. The tab "Service Area Charts" provides visual representation of the Limited English Proficient data only.

A powerpoint highlighting LEP population in various legal services service areas is also attached.

The proper sourcing of this material is 2007-2011 American Community Survey, Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS), Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) Research Division Analysis. Due to geographic limitation, for the analysis we used the data by Public Use Microdata Areas (PUMA). In many cases, multiple cities are in one PUMA. The cities/towns listed on the page are included with the PUMA referenced on each tab. See the PUMA map and the list of cities and towns in PUMAs to see geographical breakdown of the data.