The Revival of Quantification

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). 

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2019 ASEC Data Now Available from IPUMS CPS

As summer turns to fall, we look forward to changing leaves, hot cider, and a fresh crop of crisp new ASEC data! This year’s ASEC comes with many changes and improvements to family relationship, income, and health insurance data. So unpack your favorite sweater, fill your favorite mug with a warm beverage, and settle in for a run-down of the new and improved 2019 ASEC.

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Homeownership and Race in the Twin Cities: Applying IPUMS NHGIS Geographically Standardized Time Series Data

Geographically standardized time series tables from IPUMS NHGIS give users powerful new abilities to analyze census tables and geographic data across time. 

NHGIS time series tables link together comparable statistics from multiple U.S. censuses. Geographic standardization refers to harmonizing data from separate censuses to align with a consistent set of geographic boundaries. At this time, NHGIS provides 1990, 2000, and 2010 data harmonized to 2010 census units. Subsequent releases of American Community Survey (ACS) summary data also generally use 2010 census units, making it possible to link NHGIS time series directly to ACS data for any year since 2010.

In this post, we apply this innovative NHGIS data product to explore homeownership rates in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Minnesota), comparing rates of homeownership between black and white householders for 1990, 2000, 2010 and 2013-2017 ACS 5-Year Estimates.

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IPUMS International 2019 Data Release

It’s that time of year again: IPUMS International data release season! This year’s release includes new 20% samples for all current Brazil data sets, additional samples for Cambodia, Fiji, and Nepal, new samples for Guatemala, Laos, Russia, and Togo, and Labor Force Survey samples for Spain and Italy. All of these new samples and all current data can be accessed at international.ipums.org.

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