Administration

IPUMS Announces 2024 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 both published research and nominated graduate student papers from 2024 that use IPUMS data to advance or deepen our understanding of social and demographic processes.

The 2024 competition awarded prizes for the best published and best graduate student research in eight categories, each associated with specific IPUMS data collections:

  1. IPUMS USA, providing data from the U.S. decennial censuses, the American Community Survey, and includes full count data, from 1850 to the present.
  2. IPUMS CPS, providing data from the monthly U.S. labor force survey, the Current Population Survey (CPS), from 1962 to the present.
  3. IPUMS International, providing harmonized data contributed by more than 100 international statistical office partners; it currently includes information on over 1 billion people in more than 547 censuses and surveys from around the world, from 1960 forward.
  4. IPUMS Health Surveys, which makes available the U.S. National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) and the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS).
  5. IPUMS Spatial, covering IPUMS NHGIS, IPUMS IHGIS, and IPUMS CDOH. NHGIS includes GIS boundary files from 1790 to the present; IHGIS provides data tables from population and housing censuses as well as agricultural censuses from around the world; CDOH provides access to measures of disparities, policies, and counts, by state and county, for historically marginalized populations in the US.
  6. IPUMS Global Health, providing harmonized data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS), and the Performance Monitoring for Action (PMA) data series, for low and middle-income countries.
  7. IPUMS Time Use, providing time diary data from the U.S. and around the world from 1930 to the present.
  8. IPUMS Excellence in Research, The IPUMS mission of democratizing data demands that we increase representation of scholars from groups that are systemically excluded in research spaces. This award is an opportunity to highlight and reward outstanding work using any of the IPUMS data collections by authors who are underrepresented in social science research*.

Over 1,300 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 2024 honorees.

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Online IPUMS Document Collection

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By Diana L. Magnuson; Curator and Historian, ISRDI

IPUMS now has an online IPUMS Document Collection for our ancillary census and survey materials collected by IPUMS International!

Boxes on shelves holding the IPUMS International manuscript collection
The IPUMS International manuscript collection

In 1999, with a social science infrastructure grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), IPUMS International had a simple yet audaciously ambitious goal: preserve the world’s microdata resources and democratize access to those sources. Twenty-five years later, the project goals continue to be: collecting and preserving census and survey data and documentation; harmonizing those data; and disseminating the harmonized data free of charge.

IPUMS-I amassed tens of thousands of ancillary materials in support of its data harmonization work. These materials came from partner organizations: United State Census Bureau (USCB), United Nations Statistical Division (UNSD), Latin American and Caribbean Demographic Center (CELADE), The East-West Center, Centre Population et Dévelopement (CEPED), and over one hundred national statistical agencies. Examples of this material include correspondence, maps, enumerator instructions, supervisor instructions, training materials, codebooks, publicity, reports, newspaper clippings, unpublished papers, census timetables, data processing materials, and technical manuals. The ancillary materials in the IPUMS collection attest to the varied technical, business, social, and economic aspects of conducting census and surveys across time and space.

A portion of IPUMS-I grant money has funded the curation and preservation of the ancillary materials acquired by the project. For over two decades, archival staff have been preserving thousands of unique pieces of census and survey documentation, creating bibliographic records using an extended Dublin Core profile that supports the use of controlled vocabularies to enhance findability for the project staff and outside users. The goal of this work was the creation of a simple, findable, searchable, and downloadable document access system.

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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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Cite us! Seriously though…

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By Renae Rodgers and Kari Williams

Hi there IPUMS users! Let’s talk about citations. When using our datasets in your insightful, groundbreaking, interesting work, please cite us! 

Seriously though. 

Cite us. 

You wouldn’t steal a car, you wouldn’t rob a little old lady of her handbag, you wouldn’t base work on that of a colleague and not put their paper(s) in your reference section, right?!? Then don’t use IPUMS data and fail to mention it! 

To help you on your way, here are some answers to frequently asked questions:

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The Spatial Evolution of the MPC

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Willey Hall - 2772
Willey Hall, home of the MPC

Bethel University Professor of History Diana L. Magnuson is documenting the growth of the Minnesota Population Center. Believing that preserving institutional memory is vital, the Center is supporting Magnuson’s work to capture oral histories of past and present MPC faculty and staff. This is the fourth installment in a series on the institutional history of the MPC.

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A History of Data: Information Technology and the MPC

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MPCSuperman (1)

Bethel University Professor of History Diana L. Magnuson is documenting the growth of the Minnesota Population Center. Believing that preserving institutional memory is vital, the Center is supporting Magnuson’s work to capture oral histories of past and present MPC faculty and staff.

This is the second in a three-part series, with oral histories from the information technology (IT) side of the MPC. For over 16 years, the IT staff has collaborated with the MPC research staff to recode and disseminate data, develop specialized software, and make research more efficient. The “secret sauce of the MPC” is the longstanding synergistic collaboration between IT and research staff.

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