IPUMS CPS – Use It for Good

IPUMS FAQ: Alternative Measures of Unemployment

July 21, 2023 by mpcblog

By Matthew Bombyk

As part of the IPUMS mission to democratize data, our User Support team strives to answer your questions about the data. Over time, some questions are repeated. This blog post is an extension of an earlier series addressing frequently asked questions. Maybe you’ll learn something. Perhaps you’ll just find the information interesting. Regardless, we hope you enjoy it!

Here’s one of those questions:

How can I use IPUMS CPS to calculate the Alternative Measures of Unemployment published by the BLS?

Every month the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) publishes a set of Alternative Measures of Labor Underutilization as part of its well-known Employment Situation News Release. A common question we are asked at IPUMS is how to calculate these rates using IPUMS CPS data. The “headline” unemployment figure is known as U-3 and is a straightforward calculation using only the main employment status variable, EMPSTAT. However, the other measures are not quite as simple. Nonetheless, these can be calculated using IPUMS CPS! Using the table below, you can calculate these rates using the public use microdata.

Automating monthly workflows using IPUMS CPS and the IPUMS Microdata Extract API

September 22, 2022September 9, 2022 by mpcblog

By Renae Rodgers

As many readers will know, the Current Population Survey (CPS) is a monthly labor force survey that is, among other things, the data source for the monthly jobs report (or more formally the Employment Situation reports) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In this blog post, I will show you how to create a reproducible, sustainable monthly workflow to update previous analyses using new data with IPUMS CPS data, IPUMS Microdata Extract API, and the ipumspy Python library.

If this is not your first CPS rodeo, you may already have a monthly workflow for working with IPUMS CPS data that suits your needs just fine – perhaps written in Stata. Did you know you can use ipumspy to make IPUMS CPS extracts from Stata?! Check out the set up instructions and template .do file in this blog post and optimize your monthly analysis even more with the IPUMS Microdata Extract API!

But I digress. In this blog post, I will first walk through a simple analysis using the IPUMS Microdata Extract API and ipumspy. I will then show you how to package that workflow so that it can be simply executed monthly when the most recent data becomes available from IPUMS CPS for refreshed analysis including the newest data.

An example IPUMS CPS, IPUMS Microdata Extract API workflow: teleworking due to COVID-19

Let’s suppose that we’re interested in looking at trends in telework due to COVID-19 over the course of the pandemic. The IPUMS CPS variable COVIDTELEW indicates whether the respondent worked from home at any time during the past 4 weeks due to COVID-19. This example will show us the overall trend in remote work due to COVID-19 as well as how teleworking breaks down by educational attainment. First we’ll define an IPUMS CPS extract that contains COVIDTELEW and EDUC variables and all months from May 2020 to June 2022.

Helpful Functions for Constructing Reproducible Workflows in the Absence of an IPUMS Microdata Metadata API

September 22, 2022August 22, 2022 by mpcblog

by Renae Rodgers

As you may have heard, the IPUMS Microdata Extract API is now in beta for our IPUMS USA and IPUMS CPS collections! Yay! You may have also heard that an IPUMS Metadata API is not yet available. Bummer. This means that users still need to do data discovery via the IPUMS web sites, which means a lot of clicking. It also makes it difficult to set up a reproducible workflow that can be updated as new data become available (and who doesn’t want that?). This blog post will show you some easy functions you can use to retrieve sample metadata to create a monthly or annual workflow that doesn’t require visiting an IPUMS website, and walk through some ipumspy functionality to access metadata for variables already included in your IPUMS extracts. The workflow in this blog post is using ipumspy v0.2.1.

If Stata is your stats package of choice, you can leverage ipumspy to make IPUMS extracts from a Stata do file! You can spruce up your workflow with any of the functions in the blog post below by incorporating them into the template .do file offered in our blog post on making IPUMS extracts from Stata.

Sample Metadata

To get started, import the utilities module from ipumspy. All of the helper functions in this blog post will be using the CollectionInformation class from this module. The sample_ids attribute of CollectionInformation returns a dictionary with sample descriptions as keys and sample ids as values. This information is pulled from the sample ID page for the specified IPUMS data collection. This page is the source of the sample_ids dictionary for IPUMS CPS, and this page is the source of the sample_ids dictionary for IPUMS USA.

from ipumspy import utilities

Functions for retrieving IPUMS CPS sample IDs

First, let’s take a look at the sample ID dictionary for IPUMS CPS.

An Introduction to the IPUMS Extract API for Microdata

June 3, 2022 by mpcblog

By Renae Rodgers

Have you heard the news?! The IPUMS Extract API now supports microdata! For users who have been clamoring for this feature for some time, feel free to skip to the final section for resources to get started. For our users who haven’t been awaiting this announcement with bated breath, and who may be saying to themselves, “ok…great…but…”

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via GIPHY

This blog post will give a brief introduction to APIs, give some examples of ways to use the IPUMS Extract API in your workflow, and share some more in-depth resources.

What is an API?

API stands for Application Programming Interface. An API is an intermediate layer between a user and a server that allows the user to interact programmatically with another program or a service. First, the user’s program talks to the API – this is known as making an API call or a request. The API, in turn, talks to the server, translating the user’s request into something the server can understand. The server returns the requested information to the API, and the API then returns that information to the user. For example, Google Maps has an API that allows developers to request and retrieve information from Google Maps from within their applications, without needing to go through a web interface.

At this point you may be thinking, “great, now I have a general idea of what an API is, but I am not a software developer so… thanks anyway.”

via GIPHY

The IPUMS Extract API opens up many possibilities for easing collaboration, and creating efficient workflows with only a few simple lines of code. Please read on!

Introducing CPS-ASEC Longitudinal Extracts

December 20, 2021December 10, 2021 by mpcblog

By Renae Rodgers

The panel component of the Current Population Survey and new Longitudinal Extracts

Did you know that the Current Population Survey (CPS) – an important source of information on unemployment, poverty, and many other topics – has a panel component? If you didn’t, you’re not alone. The CPS rotation pattern is complex and can be difficult to work with. In fact, IPUMS CPS has held multi-day workshops intended to introduce researchers to the CPS panel component, help them understand the rotation pattern, and show some convenient IPUMS CPS features that make working with CPS panel data a little easier. If you’re completely new to the CPS panel, check out the materials from our latest workshop!

Maybe you did know about the CPS panel component, but looked at the complex rotation pattern, the Census Bureau guidelines and linking keys, and decided that this was for the birds. If this sounds like you, then our newest IPUMS CPS feature may be right for you! IPUMS CPS users can now download CPS-ASEC panels that contain two observations per person across a one-year period as longitudinal extracts. The rest of this blog post will explain what you are getting when you make a CPS-ASEC longitudinal extract and will walk you through how to create one for yourself.

IPUMS Announces 2020 Research Award Recipients

September 29, 2021May 17, 2021 by mpcblog

IPUMS 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.

How has COVID-19 affected 2020 data collection efforts?

September 29, 2021March 3, 2021 by mpcblog

By Julia A. Rivera Drew, Sarah M. Flood, Renae Rodgers

IPUMS integrates data from several major US surveys that collect data throughout the year. Below, we discuss how COVID-19 has affected how US statistical agencies have collected these survey data in 2020.

Current Population Survey (CPS)

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the Census Bureau have continued to collect data on a monthly basis during the COVID-19 pandemic, implementing some procedural modifications to protect the safety of respondents and Census Bureau employees and adding a short supplement to capture the effects of the pandemic on work in the United States.

Changes to Interviewing Procedures

Current Population Survey (CPS) data collection for March had already begun when the Census Bureau suspended in-person data collection on March 20th, 2020. Two call centers that assist with CPS data collection also closed down at this time. However, data collection continued exclusively by phone through June of 2020. In July, in-person interviews began in some areas of the country and the call centers that had been closed in March re-opened. In-person interviews were resumed in all areas of the country in September 2020 and data collection has returned to a normal routine. More information on how alternative data collection procedures affected response rates, attrition, and employment data is available on the IPUMS CPS website.

Additional COVID-related content

The COVID-19 outbreak prompted the BLS to add five questions to the monthly CPS survey about work in the time of COVID-19. These questions were first asked in May. Though the question about foregoing medical care due to the pandemic was dropped from the survey after October of 2020, all other questions will remain in the survey until further notice. Researchers may preview the questions or access the COVID-specific variables via IPUMS CPS.

IPUMS CPS will continue to update our documentation on the effects of the pandemic on CPS data collection and to make new data available as quickly as possible. Follow @ipums on Twitter for the latest updates.