Proportional Symbol Bilingualism

Intro:
The purpose of creating this map was to explore the techniques to build a proportional symbol map.  We were able to explore our own data for this map and I decided that it'd be interesting to look at peoples' ability to speak English if they come from a non-English speaking household.

Method:
I searched online and was able to find data regarding the amount of peoples, per state, whom claim that they come from a non-English speaking home, and how well they claim to speak English.  This implies biligualism, though it is entirely possible that there are persons who speak more than just two languages well. It is also true that there are many people whom hail from an English speaking household but can speak more than just English well or very well.  Taking that into consideration this is not a true map of bilingualism in the United States.  I took the count of people claiming to be from a non-English speaking household but still claiming to speak English well or very well and dropped it into an Excel file.  I was then able to calculate the size I wanted for each of the symbols by taking the square root of all of each set of numbers seperately and then scaling them from 1 to 100% of the highest value.  This gave me the proportions of shape sizes I would need for my map.  From there it was just a matter of setting up the map and scaling the circles to the right sizes for the right states.  I chose to make the circles slightly transparent to help show the state boundaries behind them.

Results:
The results of my map aren't too surprising.  The states with the larger populations had a larger number of results, while the less populated states, such as the Dakotas, had smaller results.  One interesting observation is that states in the Southwest, despite having relatively low populations, have higher values than some more populous states; also, many East Coast states had high results.  This could be due to these regions having more immigrants than other regions, particularly the central part of the country.