mpcblog 
“Good IT is invisible,” says MPC IT Core director Fran Fabrizio. “You want the users to have the idea that it’s a magic black box.” Though the intent is for the technology behind IPUMS and the other MPC data tools to seem effortless, Fabrizio understands the extent of the human work goes that goes into producing good technology. Getting 2.6 terabytes of data out to users each week requires no small amount of technology behind it.
Researchers from Cornell University, the University of Minnesota, and the Minnesota Population Center have used IPUMS Time Use data to find that mothers are less happy than fathers with their parenting duties. Mothers report more stress and greater fatigue than fathers. This experience gap is attributed to the differing tasks of each parent. The paper was recently published in the American Sociological Review.
It seems counterintuitive that rising divorce rates, fewer children, and an increase in dual-income families would result in an increase in time couples spend together, and in time parents spend with children, but according to Minnesota Population Center researcher, Katie Genadek, this is exactly what the data are showing. Her goal: to determine why an increase in factors that seem to undermine quality family time could actually result in an increase in the time families spend together.
IPUMS has updated the family interrelationship variables in IPUMS CPS and the Integrated Health Interview Series (IHIS) to include same-sex and cohabiting couples. The updated variables dramatically reduce research barriers for those interested in this family and household context.
Life can sometimes feel as though it’s lived in “fast forward.” Stressful jobs, daily hassles, and the demands of raising children can leave parents feeling as though they are fighting for every moment of family time. The notion of “family time” can conjure romanticized images of years past, with families sitting around a dining room table discussing work, school, and current events.
IPUMS CPS has added a new variable to unlock longitudinal information in CPS data called CPSIDP. The identifier, the result of a major initiative from the Minnesota Population Center, uniquely identifies individuals who are in the CPS and is assigned to the individual in each of the (up to) eight times over sixteen months that the individual is in the survey.
Benjamin Hartman is a 2016 Summer Diversity Fellow at the MPC. As part of his fellowship, he learned how to take unprocessed data to produce harmonized IPUMS-I data and documentation, make GIS maps, and conduct his own case study investigating the spatial dimensions of internal migration using the Cambodian census. Hartman worked with his colleagues in IPUMS International to create this blog post.