mpcblog – Use It for Good

Measuring Food Security with U.S. Federal Data

October 20, 2025October 10, 2025 by mpcblog

By Kari Williams & Isabel Pastoor

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) defines a household as being food secure when all household members at all times have access to “enough food for an active, healthy life;” it sets a minimum threshold for food security of “ready availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods” and the “assured ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways” (USDA Economic Research Service, 2025). The USDA provides survey modules for assessing food security in the U.S. (see Table 1), which are used in a number of federal surveys.

Following the recent announcement by the USDA that they plan to cease data collection for the Food Security supplement fielded as part of the December Current Population Survey, we are highlighting data sources for studying food security in the U.S. Table 2 provides an overview of a number of federal data sources that can be used to study aspects of food security in the U.S. This list of data sources is not exhaustive; we have prioritized data available through IPUMS and other long-running and large-scale population surveys. Additional sources covering shorter time periods or more specific focal populations can be found from the USDA’s Food Security in the United States Documentation page and the Food Access Research Atlas.

U.S. Federal Data from IPUMS during the Shutdown

October 13, 2025October 9, 2025 by mpcblog

By Sarah Flood & Kari Williams

If you eagerly await new data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) or the American Community Survey (ACS) this time of year, you might be wondering how the current U.S. federal government shutdown affects release timelines for these data. We’re wondering, too! While we don’t know when these data will be released, we can share what we know and what you can expect from IPUMS.

Delays to the release of new federal data

What we know: Any delays to the processing and release of new federal data also delays our work and the release of these data via IPUMS. We expect delays for at least some federal data releases (see this dataindex.us post for a helpful overview of federal data collection and release during a government shutdown). For example, we typically expect that the September Basic Monthly data from the CPS would be available for download from the Census Bureau website as of yesterday, October 8. However, the Census Bureau’s shutdown plans specify that monthly economic indicators will not be available during the shutdown; therefore IPUMS CPS cannot process the data until they are released.

What you can expect from us: For the foreseeable future, you can expect to see a banner on the IPUMS data collection homepages for US data sources communicating what we know about data release timelines. We will note when we are still awaiting the release of data from the original U.S. federal agency data providers, once the original data have been released and are being processed by IPUMS, and when the new data have been integrated into IPUMS.

IPUMS data will continue to be available

Accessing International Census Data Tables in R

September 24, 2025 by mpcblog

by Tsu Zhu and Tracy Kugler

ipumsr now supports IHGIS!

IPUMS spatial data users now have programmatic access to international census data tables in IHGIS. The recent release of ipumsr 0.9.0 enables users to explore metadata; build, submit, and download extracts; and read IHGIS tables directly in R. Many of the ipumsr functions that had been NHGIS-specific have now been generalized to accommodate both IHGIS and NHGIS. More information on the new functions can be found in the ipumsr changelong.

About IPUMS IHGIS

The International Historical Geographic Information System (IHGIS) provides data tables from population, housing, and agricultural censuses from around the world. The data are derived from tables originally published by national statistical offices. The format and structure of the published tables varies widely between countries and across time, even within the same country. IHGIS extracts the tables and standardizes them into a machine-readable structure along with consistently formatted metadata and corresponding GIS boundary files. As of this writing, the IHGIS collection consists of 40 datasets from population and housing censuses, 14 from agricultural censuses, and an additional 305 datasets tabulated from IPUMS International microdata samples.

Working with ipumsr for IHGIS

The following sections walk through how you would use new ipumsr functionality to explore metadata and submit an extract request for data tables from Ireland censuses from 1966 through 1991. This example highlights changes to ipumsr functions that have been generalized to support both IHGIS and NHGIS. For more details see the Aggregate Data API Requests article on the ipumsr webpage.

Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) Data Again Available to New Users

September 3, 2025 by mpcblog

By Miriam King

After funding for USAID and the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) was eliminated in February 2025, new researchers could no longer apply online for access to DHS data, and existing DHS users could not gain access to additional countries’ data. This restriction affected would-be users of both the original DHS public use files and the integrated version of DHS data through IPUMS DHS. Fortunately, The DHS Program just announced, “We are now open for new registrations.”

The DHS Program logo According to The DHS Program website, a three-year grant from the Gates Foundation is supporting the dhsprogram.com website and data archive, where researchers apply for access and can download the original public use files. Once a researcher is approved for DHS data access, they can log in to the IPUMS DHS website, create a customized dataset with the samples and harmonized variables they need, and download that file for analysis on their computer. Anyone can use the IPUMS DHS website to learn about the data, including documentation about the consistently coded variables and the availability of variables by sample, to plan a research project; they need to log in only if they would like to create and download a customized data file.

The grant funding will also support other useful elements of The DHS Program website: StatCompiler (for summary statistics by sample), the DHS Program API, and the Spatial Data Repository (for maps and shapefiles).

IPUMS MLP: Revolutionizing Linked Data

August 28, 2025July 17, 2025 by mpcblog

By Etienne Breton

As researchers, we often ask questions we cannot answer due to lack of data. More intriguingly, however, there are questions we only think of asking once we encounter data that may answer them. Good data address existing problems; great data inspire new questions. The latest iteration of the IPUMS Multigenerational Longitudinal Panel (MLP) project, which links together records from the full count US census data, fits this description. Visit our data browser and project description for inspiration on research questions you did not know could be asked – and answered.

Full count census data offer unprecedented opportunities for social scientific research. Once harmonized, these data enable precise measurement of key demographic, economic, and social patterns across time and space. Researchers can observe entire populations over long periods and produce estimates virtually free of sampling error. Estimates can also be produced down to the smallest geographical units, allowing researchers to define and observe communities with an outstanding level of detail.

Perhaps even more powerfully, full count data have opened the possibility of automated record linkages across census years to construct millions of individual life histories and trace millions of families over multiple generations. These linked data speak compellingly to core research questions in the social sciences, including intergenerational mobility and the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic characteristics; exhaustive descriptions of individual and family trajectories; internal migration patterns within small geographic units; long-term outcomes of early-life conditions; and many more.

IPUMS disseminates full count census enumerations for ten census years from 1850 to 1950. These data, covering over 800 million individual records, are the fruit of collaboration between IPUMS and the world’s two largest genealogical organizations — Ancestry.com and FamilySearch — to leverage genealogical data for scientific purposes. IPUMS MLP now offers longitudinal links between individuals and households enumerated in those ten censuses. As shown in the figure below, we offer 645 million links between census pairs in MLP’s current iteration. This amounts to more than 175 million people linked over two or more censuses.

The IPUMS Archive has moved!

July 17, 2025July 2, 2025 by mpcblog

By Diana L. Magnuson; Curator and Historian, ISRDI

Looking in the window of the Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation 50 Willey Hall at the IPUMS archives shelves filled with accordion folders and boxes For a quarter century archival staff and the physical collection of IPUMS archival materials have sojourned in spaces on the West Bank at the University of Minnesota. The People’s Center on Riverside Avenue, the fifth floor of Heller Hall, 50 Willey Hall, 1200 Washington Avenue and the West Bank Office Building on South 2nd Street have all been home to the IPUMS Archive. These moves were embedded in the organizational growth, development, and change experienced by the IPUMS projects from 1999 to the present. Since 2004, IPUMS headquarters have been in 18,500 square feet of renovated space in Willey Hall on the West Bank. The space was a $1.8 million College of Liberal Arts funded remodel of an art gallery and restaurant. Now home to the Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation, which houses the Minnesota Population Center (MPC), IPUMS, the Life Course Center (LCC), and the Minnesota Research Data Center (MnRDC), the space currently contains six private offices, ninety-one cubicles, lounge spaces, and twelve conference room spaces, including a large ninety seat capacity seminar room.

The IPUMS Archive began in earnest with the launch of IPUMS International (affectionately known as IPUMS-I in some circles), which, as of this writing, includes 104 countries; 656 censuses and surveys, and over 1-billion person records. Beginning in 1999, with a social science infrastructure grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), IPUMS International (IPUMS-I) had the ambitious goal to preserve the world’s microdata resources to democratize global access to these rich resources. In 2025, the project goals continue to be: collecting and preserving census and survey data and documentation; harmonizing these data; and disseminating the harmonized data free of charge.

Working with Subnational Geographies in IPUMS Global Health

June 17, 2025 by mpcblog

By Divya Pandey and Anna Bolgrien

In a research project combining data from IPUMS MICS and IPUMS DHS, IPUMS Global Health staff examined trends in the relationship between open defecation and high infant mortality rates (IMR) in the Eastern Indo-Gangetic Plains. The project focused on selected bordering regions in Nepal, Bangladesh, and India. By analyzing these environmentally and agro-climatically comparable regions, the study aimed to isolate the impact of national and local policies on open defecation and infant mortality rates.

Figure 1: Regions included in the study

A map of the border and surrounding regions of Nepal, Bangladesh, and India that highlights the sub-national regions included in the study.

The study pooled data from IPUMS MICS and IPUMS DHS to look at trends over almost two decades. IPUMS DHS includes data for all three countries, and IPUMS MICS provides additional years of data for Nepal and Bangladesh. Since the study focused on selected bordering geographies, the authors worked with data from lower administrative levels—divisions in Bangladesh, states in India, and regions in Nepal. Leveraging the geography resources provided by IPUMS, the team used both spatially harmonized and sample-specific geography variables (learn more about IPUMS DHS geography variables and IPUMS MICS geography variables). Spatially harmonized geography variables identify geographic regions using a consistent spatial footprint to allow for the comparison of the same physical space over time. Sample-specific geography variables are not harmonized across time; as their name suggests, they use the geographic boundaries that are sample-specific or contemporaneous to the survey-year in a country.