Methodology
To determine the states that are most obsessed with Halloween, 24/7 Tempo created an index that includes the frequency at which Halloween-specific terms were searched on Google. We retrieved these statistics from Google Trends and weighted terms that are most closely associated with Halloween, such as Halloween costumes and Halloween decorations.
The index also includes the number of costume stores, candy stores, haunted houses, and the total pounds of the top three candies bought in each state. We retrieved the number of costume and candy stores and haunted tours and houses from Yelp. We only considered cities with at least 100,000 people. For smaller states, we considered the five largest cities. The pounds of candy purchased in each state comes from the blog Candy Store, and is a weighted yearly average based on sales data compiled from 2007-2018, with more recent years weighed more heavily. For each state, we added the total number of pounds of the three most-purchased candies.
To identify the best place in each state for trick-or-treaters, 24/7 Tempo created an index using data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) 2017 5-Year Estimates and the FBI’s 2017 Uniform Crime Report. The index consists of four measures: rates for poverty, housing occupancy and violent crime, and the share of the population aged 14 and younger.
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