Online Analysis Tool Now Exports CSV Output

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By Matthew Sobek

IPUMS is pleased to announce a major usability upgrade to our online analysis tool: the ability to download tabular output as a CSV file. No more cleaning up html!

The IPUMS online analysis tool has been a big hit with our users, and we’ve made it available for most of the IPUMS data collections. If you haven’t tried it, you should. We even have a tutorial.

Despite its popularity with users, the SDA (Survey Documentation and Analysis) software that drives the system has always had a significant limitation: it produces tables in html format, which is fine for web display but highly inconvenient for cutting and pasting into documents.

In spring 2020 the SDA folks at the Institute for Scientific Analysis were looking for a new project and thoughtfully asked what change we thought users would most appreciate. We responded immediately “CSV downloads,” and within a few months, they had produced a working version of the software that incorporates the new feature. We have now upgraded all the IPUMS sites that offer online analysis to the new version of SDA.

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IPUMS Announces 2020 Research Award Recipients

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IPUMS research awardsIPUMS is excited to announce the winners of its annual IPUMS Research Awards. These awards honor the best-published research and nominated graduate student papers from 2020 that used IPUMS data to advance or deepen our understanding of social and demographic processes.

IPUMS, developed by and housed at the University of Minnesota, is the world’s largest individual-level population database, providing harmonized data on people in the U.S. and around the world to researchers at no cost.

There are six award categories, and each is tied to the following IPUMS projects:

  • IPUMS USA, providing data from the U.S. decennial censuses, the American Community Survey, and IPUMS CPS from 1850 to the present.
  • IPUMS International, providing harmonized data contributed by more than 100 international statistical office partners; it currently includes information on 500 million people in more than 200 censuses from around the world, from 1960 forward.
  • IPUMS Health Surveys, which makes available the U.S. National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) and the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS).
  • IPUMS Spatial, covering IPUMS NHGIS and IPUMS Terra. NHGIS includes GIS boundary files from 1790 to the present; Terra provides data on population and the environment from 1960 to the present.
  • IPUMS Global Health: providing harmonized data from the Demographic and Health Surveys and the Performance Monitoring and Accountability surveys, for low and middle-income countries from the 1980s to the present.
  • IPUMS Time Use, providing time diary data from the U.S. and around the world from 1965 to the present.

Over 2,500 publications based on IPUMS data appeared in journals, magazines, and newspapers worldwide last year. From these publications and from nominated graduate student papers, the award committees selected the 2020 honorees.

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PMA Data Analysis Hub

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By Matt Gunther

IPUMS PMA has launched a new blog aimed at introducing harmonized family planning data through step-by-step analysis examples written in R. Whether you’re looking for a place to dive into Performance Monitoring for Action data or a way to learn more about free and open-source data analysis tools, the PMA Data Analysis Hub is a great place to start!

You’ll find a new post every two weeks highlighting different tips for working with PMA data. Usually, we organize these posts in a series around a theme or a particular group of variables. For example, did you know that PMA collects data from both individuals and health service providers in the same geographic area? We’ve just completed our first series of posts showing how to use service provider data as context for the family planning outcomes experienced by individuals.

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