IPUMS – Page 4 – Use It for Good

New survey data from IPUMS PMA allows for exploration of factors in child nutrition status

December 21, 2021June 1, 2020 by mpcblog

By Devon Kristiansen

Last month, when IPUMS PMA released data from nine countries, including the most recent person level and service delivery point level surveys on family planning, we also released data on a new topic for Performance Monitoring for Action (PMA) – nutrition. PMA conducted two survey rounds each in Burkina Faso and Kenya (2017 and 2018) in both in people’s homes (households) and where they received care and medical services (service delivery points). Household surveys contained questions about the diet and nutritional status of children under 5 and women between 10 and 49 years, antenatal care and advice received by currently or recently pregnant women, and other household and demographic questions. Service delivery points were surveyed for medical equipment and services relating to malnutrition and anthropometric monitoring.

A key factor for nutrition status of young children in the low and middle-income country (LMIC) context is incidence of diarrhea. Diarrhea prevents the uptake of nutrients into the child’s body and causes dehydration. According to the World Health Organization¹, diarrhea is the leading cause of malnutrition and second leading cause of death for children under 5 globally. A well-established association in the nutrition literature is the presence of livestock on the homestead and incidence of diarrhea in young children, due to fecal contamination of water and food sources^{2, 3}.

IPUMS ATUS data now available for online analysis

February 10, 2021May 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).

IPUMS Announces 2019 Research Award Recipients

February 10, 2021March 26, 2020 by mpcblog

IPUMS is excited to announce the winners of its annual IPUMS Research Awards. These awards honor the best-published research and self-nominated graduate student papers from 2019 that used IPUMS data to advance or deepen our understanding of social and demographic processes.

IPUMS, developed by and housed at the University of Minnesota, is the world’s largest individual-level population database, providing harmonized data on people in the U.S. and around the world to researchers at no cost.

New Products! IPUMS GeoMarker and NHGIS APIs

February 10, 2021January 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

January 14, 2020January 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!

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).