The team at IPUMS-USA is excited to announce the release of the 2015 American Community Survey (ACS) microdata file. IPUMS USA now contains 16 years of yearly ACS microdata for analysis. For researchers, ACS data is the most frequently used IPUMS data.
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.
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.
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.
TerraPop recently launched TerraScope, a map-based portal for exploring the data in the TerraPop collection. The TerraPop collection includes census data from over 160 countries around the world, as well as environmental data describing land cover, land use, and climate. With such a broad range of data available, selecting a study area for which data are available to study a particular question or, conversely, determining the types of research questions that can be studied within an area of interest can be challenging.
If you are a student, faculty member, or researcher in the United States, you can learn about IPUMS data through an exhibit or workshop at professional conferences held on multiple occasions each year. Thousands of U.S. demographers, geographers, sociologists, economists, ecologists, health researchers, and others have learned about IPUMS through these events. But what if you are student, teacher, or researcher in Africa, where resources are far less plentiful?