mpcblog – Page 13 – Use It for Good

IPUMS ATUS data now available for online analysis

August 15, 2025May 13, 2020 by mpcblog

A Q&A about the new tool

By Daniel Backman, Senior Data Analyst, IPUMS

Earlier this year, the IPUMS Time Use team enabled analysis of American Time Use Survey (ATUS) data via an online data analysis tool. The Survey Documentation and Analysis (SDA) program was developed at UC Berkeley and allows users to analyze data online without a statistical package.

What data are available for analysis?

All years of ATUS data are available for online analysis. Users can choose to analyze a single year of ATUS data, or select among a number of multiple-year data files. Data from specific modules are also pooled together to facilitate analysis of ATUS module data and appropriate weights are set as defaults.

If you are familiar with ATUS data, it is important to note that the data in SDA are not in a hierarchical (or time sequence) format. As such, you are not able to create your own time use variables that summarize time use within a person through the SDA tool. However, a number of pre-fabricated time use variables are available (BLS and IPUMS summary variables as well as the ERS Eating and Health module time use variables).

IPUMS Announces 2019 Research Award Recipients

June 18, 2025March 26, 2020 by mpcblog

IPUMS is excited to announce the winners of its annual IPUMS Research Awards. These awards honor the best-published research and self-nominated graduate student papers from 2019 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.

Enumerating America

August 14, 2025March 5, 2020 by mpcblog

Census Day (April 1) is fast approaching, and “Enumerating America” celebrates 230 years of the census-taker’s job.

New Products! IPUMS GeoMarker and NHGIS APIs

June 6, 2025January 30, 2020 by mpcblog

The IPUMS spatial team is excited to introduce two new products that expand the ways you can access NHGIS data. IPUMS GeoMarker enables you to easily attach contextual characteristics from ACS data to address or point data, and the first public IPUMS API provides programmatic access to NHGIS data and metadata. Both products officially moved out of beta in December 2019.

New Year, New Me: IPUMS Bibliography

June 21, 2025January 14, 2020 by mpcblog

With a new year comes resolutions to become better versions of ourselves. Perhaps you have resolved to be more organized, appreciate the little things, or just reaffirm your commitment to using data for good-never for evil. Dream big because IPUMS wants to help you achieve your goals (unless you have again promised yourself that you will floss daily)!

We recently resolved to outperform Google*. An ambitious team, led by Erin Meyer, set out to close the gap between citation counts in the IPUMS bibliography and Google Scholar. They scoured the internet to uncover your incredible research accomplishments that use IPUMS data. And oh did they find research!

The Revival of Quantification

June 6, 2025December 18, 2019 by mpcblog

In November, our fearless leader, Steve Ruggles, gave his presidential address at the annual Social Science History Association (SSHA) conference in Chicago. It was titled “The Revival of Quantification.” Ruggles describes long-run trends in quantification in history. He also focused on the relationship of historical quantification to political activism, relativism (no absolute truth), and objectivism (one Truth and that Truth is reached through empirical observation).

Travel in the ATUS: Where You Are or What You’re Doing?

June 9, 2025November 26, 2019 by mpcblog

It’s that time of year again! The weather is getting colder by the day, and it’s the perfect time to travel. Wait, before you click away, this is not a travel ad (though maybe you would like it to be? Stay tuned…). Instead, this is a piece about measuring travel in the American Time Use Survey (IPUMS ATUS).