Posts related to IPUMS USA
The Minnesota Population Center (MPC) is excited to announce the winners of its annual IPUMS Research Awards. The awards honor the best published research and best self-nominated graduate student papers of 2015 that used MPC data to advance or deepen our understanding of social and demographic processes.
Family-member characteristics are often related to individual outcomes. The IPUMS data extract system makes it easy for you to include in your datasets variables that describe other household members, such as age of mother, occupation of father, or educational attainment of spouse.
Associate Professor of History and MPC Faculty Member J. David Hacker made headlines in 2011 when he published a groundbreaking study of the total number of U.S. Civil War dead. Hacker argued that the widely-accepted figure of 620,000 was far too low. Using IPUMS, Hacker showed that the number of dead was at least 750,000—if not more. His article, “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War,” published in Civil War History, was introduced by the editors in the issue as “among the most consequential pieces ever to appear in this journal’s pages.”
Few demographic historians expect attention from mainstream press when they publish their research, but Hacker’s study attracted national interest, including interviews with the New York Times and National Public Radio.