Use It for Good – Page 16 – News and information from IPUMS

The New IPUMS Forum

June 21, 2025February 26, 2019 by mpcblog

As some of you may have noticed, the IPUMS Forum just had a major reimagining. Maybe it was the cabin fever of a particularly snowy Minnesota February, or maybe it was the faceless stare of our old forum’s default avatar, but something was telling us it was time for a change. And this is a big change. Not only does the forum have a snazzy new look, but it also comes with a new set of features. No more struggling to attach documents and images, no more accidentally submitting a question twice, no more faceless avatar judging you with their perfect side-part and prominent jaw line, and did I mention emojis!?!?! Best of all, this new forum is built with discussion in mind (the company that built the platform is even called Discourse). Where the old forum was a fairly rigid, question/answer framework, this new forum encourages conversation by allowing follow-up replies, relating topics to one another, and did I mention EMOJIS??!!!

Seriously haunting.

IPUMS USA: County Variable Name Changes

June 20, 2025January 29, 2019 by mpcblog

“What’s in a name? That which we call a COUNTYFIPS by any other name would still be accurate” ~ Steve Shakespeare (the lesser known, quantitative Shakespeare).

Couldn’t have said it better myself. Though, when you are sharing your variable names with tens of thousands of researchers who really just want their analysis to work you may want to be cautious about changing variable names. This is exactly the reason our (now re-named) COUNTY variable held onto that moniker for so long. And when you do change variable names you better try your hardest to let everyone know, so let’s start with that part.

IPUMS DHS at Work | “Child Stunting: National Figures Conceal Subnational Heterogeneity”

June 6, 2025October 3, 2018 by mpcblog

While summary national-level statistics from sources such as the World Bank are a useful tool, these national-level figures may conceal great heterogeneity across subnational units such as provinces and large urban areas. Such differences are displayed in the figures below, with data on the percentage of stunted children under age 5, nationally and by region within countries. For example, while 40 to 50 percent of Tanzanian children overall are stunted, the figures range from under 20 percent to 50 percent or more across Tanzanian regions.

IPUMS International Goes Around the World

June 12, 2025August 30, 2018 by mpcblog

IPUMS International has been living up to its name. In June and July, International staff traveled to four different conferences and braved the sweltering heat to talk about IPUMS with data users and producers, old and new. Here is a summary of their summer activities.

IPUMS DHS Now Releasing Data Multiple Times per Year

June 6, 2025July 30, 2018 by mpcblog

The Demographic and Health Survey program is continually collecting and releasing new data; at this writing, nineteen countries are collecting or processing data for standard DHS surveys. Researchers want the latest data for countries of interest, as soon as those data become available. To minimize the wait between the original DHS data release and the release of integrated data, IPUMS DHS is now releasing data multiple times a year.

IPUMS FAQs: Where are the Data Quality Flags for Income Variables?

June 6, 2025June 26, 2018 by mpcblog

At IPUMS, we try to address every user’s questions and suggestions about our data. It is just one feature that adds value to IPUMS data. Over time, many questions are often repeated. In this blog series we will be sharing some of these frequently asked questions. Maybe you’ll learn something. Perhaps you’ll just find these interesting. Regardless, we hope you enjoy.

Here’s one of those questions:

Where are the data quality flags for income variables?

2017 IPUMS Research Awards

June 12, 2025June 6, 2018 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 2017 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.