Dissemination and Outreach – Page 2

Where was IPUMSI in 2020?

September 29, 2021March 22, 2021 by mpcblog

By Jane Lyon Lee, IPUMS International

Last March, when the IPUMS International research team attended the 51st Meeting of the UN Statistical Commission, we were just beginning to hear about the spread of a novel virus. We soon discovered that the Commission meeting would be our last in-person event of the year. Soon after, a pandemic quickly paralyzed our world, including the ever-important census and survey work. We all were called on to seek out and, in some cases, create new paths via which data collection, protection, analysis, and dissemination could continue.

Mapping Block-Level Segregation: The Twin Cities’ Black Population, 1980-2010

December 21, 2021February 10, 2021 by mpcblog

Research, data preparation, story and graphics by Amalea Jubara and Yaxuan Zhang (Minnesota Population Center, Summer Diversity Fellows), mentored by Jonathan Schroeder (IPUMS Research Scientist) and Ying Song (Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, Environment & Society)

Edited by Jonathan Schroeder (IPUMS Research Scientist)

IPUMS NHGIS Block Data: An Expanding Collection

The most spatially precise U.S. census data are block-level tables, summarizing population and housing characteristics for millions of blocks throughout the country. IPUMS NHGIS provides block-level tables for the 1970 to 2010 decennial censuses as well as block boundary files for 1990, 2000 and 2010. This collection is set to grow substantially in the next few years as NHGIS adds new 2020 census block data and as we continue with a major initiative to construct 1980 and 1970 block boundary files. This expansion will open up new possibilities for high-precision spatial analysis across a longer time span.

A Case Study of the Twin Cities’ Black Population

To demonstrate some of the potential value of this expanding collection, we use NHGIS block data, including some not-yet-released 1980 block boundaries, to explore the recent history of racial segregation and integration in the Black population of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, from 1980 to 2010. We present the block data in an interactive map along with data on early-20th-century racial covenants and the “redlining” zones of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), recently published by the Mapping Prejudice and Mapping Inequality projects.

The block-level changes since 1980 show a striking trend toward greater dispersion and integration of Black residents, but segregation persists; several neighborhoods still have uniformly low or high proportions of Black residents. By overlaying racial covenants and HOLC zones with the block data, we can also find cases where the historical discriminatory practices appear to have left a lasting imprint on the distribution of Black residents.

1930/31 Time Diary Data from College Educated Women in the United States

December 21, 2021January 25, 2021 by mpcblog

IPUMS Time Use, in partnership with Dr. Teresa Harms of the Centre for Time Use Research, is proud to announce the public release of the 1930-31 USDA College Women Time Use study. These data provide researchers a unique look into the lives of married, college-educated women at the beginning of the Great Depression. The respondents were asked to complete a detailed record of their time use for seven consecutive 24-hour periods (see a sample daily diary below; borrowed with permission from Teresa Harms, CTUR). The women described activities in their own words, listing them consecutively as they occurred throughout the day, with a minimum interval of five minutes. They also recorded the time devoted to various homemaking tasks by other household members and paid help as well as demographic and work status data and information about the household. The data also include the verbatim activity reports and the occupations the women reported at the time of data collection. All data are available via the IPUMS American Heritage Time Use Study (AHTUS) extract system.

IPUMS IHGIS: Unlocking International Population and Agricultural Census Data

December 21, 2021November 5, 2020 by mpcblog

By Tracy Kugler

Nearly all countries throughout the world conduct population and housing censuses at least every ten years, and most also conduct agricultural censuses or surveys regularly. These censuses collect information on demographics, education, employment, housing characteristics, migration, agricultural land ownership, agricultural workforce, livestock, crops, and more. The resulting data can be used to study a wide range of questions, from the character of demographic transitions within and across countries, to utilization of irrigation, to educational trends among women.

Unfortunately, this wealth of data has remained largely inaccessible to researchers. The data are typically published in reports as tables summarizing population characteristics. In recent decades, many of these reports have been published as PDF documents and made available on national statistical office websites. While the reports are available, data from a PDF document cannot be easily imported into a statistical or GIS package. Furthermore, the table structures are highly heterogeneous, both across countries and even within the same report.

The International Historical Geographic Information System (IPUMS IHGIS) is designed to provide easy access to these data in a way that researchers can easily use for analysis. In the early phases, IHGIS was known internally as “Project Mako,” named after the Mako shark, which has a global range, voracious appetite, and a reputation for a broad-ranging diet. Like the shark, IHGIS (née Project Mako) will encompass the world and ingest all kinds of data tables.

Enumerating America

February 10, 2021March 5, 2020 by mpcblog

Census Day (April 1) is fast approaching, and “Enumerating America” celebrates 230 years of the census-taker’s job.

The Revival of Quantification

January 14, 2020December 18, 2019 by mpcblog

In November, our fearless leader, Steve Ruggles, gave his presidential address at the annual Social Science History Association (SSHA) conference in Chicago. It was titled “The Revival of Quantification.” Ruggles describes long-run trends in quantification in history. He also focused on the relationship of historical quantification to political activism, relativism (no absolute truth), and objectivism (one Truth and that Truth is reached through empirical observation).

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).