We all know about what Phyllis Moen calls the linear lockstep life path: first learning, then working for advancement (or at least security), then retirement. What happens when this traditional path no longer fits the realities of most people’s lives?
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.
Associate Professor of Epidemiology Theresa Osypuk is using new tools and methods to rethink the way inequality relates to health in the U.S. Using data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing demonstration project, Osypuk is revealing that the health gains in families who have relocated away from poverty vary.
“Good IT is invisible,” says MPC IT Core director Fran Fabrizio. “You want the users to have the idea that it’s a magic black box.” Though the intent is for the technology behind IPUMS and the other MPC data tools to seem effortless, Fabrizio understands the extent of the human work goes that goes into producing good technology. Getting 2.6 terabytes of data out to users each week requires no small amount of technology behind it.
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.
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.