IPUMS PMA Longitudinal Data

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By Devon Kristiansen

When Performance Monitoring for Action (PMA) initiated data collection in 2013, the survey design was a high-frequency, cross-sectional series with a focus on family planning, water, and sanitation indicators. Beginning in 2019, PMA refocused on reproductive and sexual health, and adjusted the survey design to add a contraceptive calendar and a longitudinal panel of women of childbearing age to observe contraceptive and fertility dynamics.

In order help researchers leverage the rich data from the redesigned PMA, IPUMS PMA has updated its online data dissemination system to provide longitudinal data in long form or wide form, delivering data files that link the women’s panel records.

The longitudinal data are designed to allow for analysis of contraceptive uptake, discontinuation, and method switching, as well as changes in fertility intentions and actualization over time. However, the redesigned survey also includes many new questions, including questions about domestic violence, women’s economic empowerment, abortion, health care access during COVID-19, and many other topics.

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Reproductive Calendar Data Now Available from IPUMS DHS

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By Miriam L. King

IPUMS DHS has released data for a new unit of analysis, woman-months, based on retrospective calendar data offering a month-to-month history of a woman’s reproductive events during the preceding five years.

Woman Months: Each record will be a woman-month from respective calendar data.

The calendar data document for every month whether a woman gave birth, was pregnant, or terminated a pregnancy. For most samples, the monthly record also indicates whether the woman used a (specified) contraceptive method and her the reason for stopping use of the method. Some samples also collect information on the woman’s union status, employment, and the type of pregnancy termination.

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Better Maps with Census Centers of Population

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Jonathan Schroeder, IPUMS Research Scientist, NHGIS Project Manager

The best mapping resource no one’s using?

In the domain of U.S. population mapping, the Census Bureau’s centers of population may be the nation’s most underused data resource. Before I explain why, let’s cover some basics…

What are they? A center of population represents the mean location of residence for an area’s population, roughly the average latitude and longitude, adjusting for the curvature of the earth. For the last three decennial censuses (2000, 2010, 2020), the Census Bureau has published centers of population separately for U.S. states, counties, census tracts, and block groups.

Where can you get them? Through the Census Bureau website, you can download files containing the latitude and longitude coordinates for centers of population. To facilitate mapping and analysis, IPUMS NHGIS has transformed the coordinates into point shapefiles, available for download through the NHGIS Data Finder.

What are they used for? At the moment, not much! But there are dozens of settings where they’d be helpful. I’m hoping this blog will help get the word out, and if it does, you might now be reading this in some future age, marveling how we ever went so long without using them!

OK, how should we use them? In the case of statistical maps—my focus here—centers of population are wonderfully effective for placing proportional symbols. I share lots of examples down below to demonstrate, but first, let’s consider the general advantages of proportional symbol maps compared to a more common alternative: choropleth maps…

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IPUMS FAQs: How do the original occupation and industry codes map onto harmonized versions created by IPUMS?

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By Kari Williams

As part of the IPUMS mission to democratize data, our user support team strives to answer your questions about the data. Over time, some questions are repeated. This blog post is an extension of an earlier series addressing frequently asked questions. Maybe you’ll learn something. Perhaps you’ll just find the information interesting. Regardless, we hope you enjoy it!

Here’s one of those questions:

How do the original occupation and industry codes map onto harmonized versions created by IPUMS?

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Using the MEPS-HC to Study Change in Adult Mental Health

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By Julia A. Rivera Drew and Natalie Del Ponte

The Medical Expenditure Panel Survey-Household Component, or MEPS-HC, data are an invaluable resource for studying short-term trajectories in health, including adult mental health. An integrated series of the MEPS-HC data is available at IPUMS MEPS. Collected on the Self-Administered Questionnaire and, starting in 2019, the Preventive Self-Administered Questionnaire, the MEPS-HC includes two validated adult mental health scales. The Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K6) and the two-item Patient Health Questionnaire depression screener (PHQ-2) are asked twice per panel, during interview rounds 2 and 4 (see Table 1). There are also two validated scales measuring health-related quality of life (HRQOL) that capture several interrelated health domains, including mental health. These include the Short Form-12 (SF-12) in 2000-2016 and the Veterans RAND-12 (VR-12) starting in 2017 (see Table 2 for VR-12 measures). For more information on the SF-12, see the section on SF-12 scoring on MCS and for more information on the VR-12, see ADDAYA.

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Introducing CPS-ASEC Longitudinal Extracts

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By Renae Rodgers

The panel component of the Current Population Survey and new Longitudinal Extracts

Did you know that the Current Population Survey (CPS) – an important source of information on unemployment, poverty, and many other topics – has a panel component? If you didn’t, you’re not alone. The CPS rotation pattern is complex and can be difficult to work with. In fact, IPUMS CPS has held multi-day workshops intended to introduce researchers to the CPS panel component, help them understand the rotation pattern, and show some convenient IPUMS CPS features that make working with CPS panel data a little easier. If you’re completely new to the CPS panel, check out the materials from our latest workshop!

Maybe you did know about the CPS panel component, but looked at the complex rotation pattern, the Census Bureau guidelines and linking keys, and decided that this was for the birds. If this sounds like you, then our newest IPUMS CPS feature may be right for you! IPUMS CPS users can now download CPS-ASEC panels that contain two observations per person across a one-year period as longitudinal extracts. The rest of this blog post will explain what you are getting when you make a CPS-ASEC longitudinal extract and will walk you through how to create one for yourself.

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IHGIS Research Example: Fertilizer Use from Agricultural Census Data

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By Chris M. Boyd

The IPUMS International Historical Geographic Information System (IHGIS) provides subnational data from agricultural and population and housing censuses from around the world. The agricultural census data cover a wide range of information on agricultural inputs, labor, production, and more, which can be used to explore a variety of research questions. IHGIS data can help understand, for instance, which factors contribute to better crop productivity, including the role of fertilizer use. Researchers have used agricultural census data at the subnational level to analyze the negative relationship between farm size and fertilizer overuse in China1; the relationship between maize yield, farm size and fertilizer and irrigation use in Mexico2; the use of chemical fertilizers in direct market farms in the U.S.3; and the environmental sustainability of using fertilizers, insecticides and pesticides in Pakistan4.

To date, IHGIS has released Agricultural Census tables for ten countries (see https://ihgis.ipums.org/dataset-descriptions), including seven developing countries in Africa and the Pacific Islands. These seven datasets include information about fertilizer use, though each measures it in a different way (see Table 1). Despite the differences, these data can reveal broad patterns in the use of fertilizer by farmers among these countries.

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