Data – Page 9 – Use It for Good

IPUMS ATUS data now available for online analysis

June 6, 2025May 13, 2020 by mpcblog

A Q&A about the new tool

By Daniel Backman, Senior Data Analyst, IPUMS

Earlier this year, the IPUMS Time Use team enabled analysis of American Time Use Survey (ATUS) data via an online data analysis tool. The Survey Documentation and Analysis (SDA) program was developed at UC Berkeley and allows users to analyze data online without a statistical package.

What data are available for analysis?

All years of ATUS data are available for online analysis. Users can choose to analyze a single year of ATUS data, or select among a number of multiple-year data files. Data from specific modules are also pooled together to facilitate analysis of ATUS module data and appropriate weights are set as defaults.

If you are familiar with ATUS data, it is important to note that the data in SDA are not in a hierarchical (or time sequence) format. As such, you are not able to create your own time use variables that summarize time use within a person through the SDA tool. However, a number of pre-fabricated time use variables are available (BLS and IPUMS summary variables as well as the ERS Eating and Health module time use variables).

New Products! IPUMS GeoMarker and NHGIS APIs

June 6, 2025January 30, 2020 by mpcblog

The IPUMS spatial team is excited to introduce two new products that expand the ways you can access NHGIS data. IPUMS GeoMarker enables you to easily attach contextual characteristics from ACS data to address or point data, and the first public IPUMS API provides programmatic access to NHGIS data and metadata. Both products officially moved out of beta in December 2019.

New Year, New Me: IPUMS Bibliography

June 21, 2025January 14, 2020 by mpcblog

With a new year comes resolutions to become better versions of ourselves. Perhaps you have resolved to be more organized, appreciate the little things, or just reaffirm your commitment to using data for good-never for evil. Dream big because IPUMS wants to help you achieve your goals (unless you have again promised yourself that you will floss daily)!

We recently resolved to outperform Google*. An ambitious team, led by Erin Meyer, set out to close the gap between citation counts in the IPUMS bibliography and Google Scholar. They scoured the internet to uncover your incredible research accomplishments that use IPUMS data. And oh did they find research!

In the Archive: “25 Years of IPUMS Data”

December 18, 2019July 22, 2019 by mpcblog

“25 Years of IPUMS Data,” the current IPUMS/MPC archive exhibit, highlights a dynamic quarter center history of data innovation at the University of Minnesota. In the late 1980s, the Social History Research Laboratory at the University of Minnesota’s History Department proposed “the creation of a single integrated microdata series composed of public use samples for every year … with the exception of the 1890 census, which was destroyed by fire.” The primary aim was to make the U.S. census microdata “as compatible over time as possible while losing little, if any, of the detail in the original datasets” (Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: A Prospectus).

IPUMS Announces Winners of Annual Research Awards

June 12, 2025May 10, 2017 by mpcblog

IPUMS is excited to announce the winners of its annual IPUMS Research Awards. The awards honor the best of 2016’s published research and self-nominated graduate student papers that used IPUMS data to advance or deepen our understanding of social and demographic processes.

Data Release: U.S. Household-level Full Count Data from 1790-1840

June 16, 2025December 5, 2016 by mpcblog

1800census

In collaboration with our partners at Ancestry.com, the Minnesota Population Center has released new historical census data through IPUMS-USA. Full count data for 1790-1840 is available via IPUMS-USA as household-level and county-level datasets* for each decennial census year and for the combined years, 1790-1840.

Wrangling International Census Tables

November 17, 2016November 17, 2016 by mpcblog

aggdatasheets2 IPUMS-International currently disseminates census microdata from 82 countries around the world. It’s an impressive collection. But it still only covers about half the world’s countries. Under the TerraPop project, we are working to assemble a truly comprehensive global collection of population data.