September 21st

PUMS Data

  • Remember when using PUMS data that researchers try to protect individuals identities, so will change characteristics about them
  • May change Female to Male or switch two people's incomes, could affect data in ways that hurt your research, or may not

ipums.org

  • Can access data international populations or USA
  • USA data from Census and American Community Survey (ACS)
  • After creating user-name, can request an extract (subset of available data), from a range of years, can specify and filter the data to get only what you need
  • When requesting PUMS data, use default settings, unless need to add information to request
  • Comes in code, with codebook, but can be opened in programs like SAS, STATA, etc., for ease of manipulating data
  • Can access sets of PUMS data faster, if do not need to download and keep, by clicking on the link "Analyze Data Online", and select variables you need represented on a table or graph
  • Always be sure to pay attention to Household and People's weights
  • Remember there are two implied decimal places in Household and people's weights (e.g. if have 005000, is equal to 50, so this Household or person would represent 50 Households/people