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The Health of Jefferson County
Sociodemographics
How people live – the sociodemographic context
of their lives – influences their health. People
who have lower incomes may not have the resources to
meet basic needs including food, clothing, shelter,
and healthcare. Insufficient resources can lead to negative
health outcomes. Those with higher incomes may have
adequate resources to meet basic needs, which in turn
leads to improved heath outcomes.
Communities with concentrations of low-income populations
often have higher levels of health-related problems
than more affluent communities. Identifying these patterns
is important because differences between a community’s
demographic characteristics can help explain differences
in health indicators for these communities. Therefore,
understanding variations in community characteristics
is an important part of community assessment.
This section summarizes data on the County population’s
gender, age, race, ethnicity, education, income, migration,
disability, and housing.
Population Growth
Between 1980 and 2002, the population of Jefferson
County increased by two-thirds, from 15,965 in 1980
to 25,953 in 2000. The projected 2002 population is
26,600. Since 1980, the county’s population growth
rate generally exceeded that of Washington State, except
for the 2000-2002 period, when it fell below the state
average (2.5%) to 1.1% (Figure 1).
Migration
Virtually all of Jefferson County’s
growth in the past 20 years comes from net in-migration
(i.e. more people have been moving into the county than
leaving through death or out-migration). In both 1990
and 2000, 71% of residents reported that they had lived
in the county for at least five years.
Among residents who moved to Jefferson County within
the past five years, about 13% had lived elsewhere in
Washington in the previous 5 years, and 16% had lived
outside of the state or out of the country. Within Jefferson
County, Brinnon had the largest proportion of stable
population, with almost 95% of residents having lived
in the Brinnon area during the previous 5 years (Table
1). Conversely, nearly one third of Port Ludlow CDP
residents moved to the area within the previous 5 years.
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