Combining several population proportions and calculate a new proportion for the whole group

percentagesstatistics

I wasn't quite sure what kind of title to put on this, but I hope I'll be able to explain my question well enough below.

I have socio-economic data on several different postal codes where I can see the "proportion of the population with X" for each of them. For example:

  • Proportion of the population with university level education (e.g. 0.34).
  • Proportion of the population with yearly salary above X dollars (e.g. 0.63)

Now, I would like to group several of these postal codes together so that I can look at them as a group, since they might constitute an entire municipality or a metropolitan area of interest.

How should I go about calculating the proportion of these new groups? This might be a simple question for most of you, but unfortunately for me, math is really not my strongest suit. Since each postal code will have populations of different sizes, I will have to take those populations into consideration, right?

Let's create an example.
I want to look at Proportion of the population with university level education:

  • Postal code 001: 1324 inhabitants, proportion 0.23
  • Postal code 002: 764 inhabitants, proportion 0.42
  • Postal code 003: 943 inhabitants, proportion 0.37
  • Postal code 004: 213 inhabitants, proportion 0.86

Can anyone help me understand how I can group these postal codes together and the steps needed to calculate a new proportion for all of these inhabitants together?

Thank you very much in advance

Best Answer

Simply calculate how many people that proportion represents in each postal code, add them together, and see what proportion that is from the total population of those postal codes.

In your example those proportions represent $1324\times 0.23 + 764\times 0.42 + 943 \times 0.37 + 213 \times 0.86 = 305+321+349+183= 1158$ people. I have rounded each product to a whole number before adding them.

There are $1324+764+943+213=3244$ people all together.

For the four postal codes combined this gives a proportion of $\frac{1158}{3244}=0.36$ when rounded to two decimals.