2011 ACS 5 Year Sample -- Connecting Aggregate County Level Info to Microdata

1

Hello,

I am doing some labor market work and have run into a snag. I have been trying to merge a data set that contains the % employed in each industrial category for each county in the U.S.A [taken from 2011 ACS 5 Year Estimates Tables on American Factfinder] with the individual level 2011 ACS 5-year PUMS file downloaded from this site. Specifically, I am trying to have each respondent in the 2011 ACS 5-year PUMS file linked up with the industrial composition of their county of residence. I am aware that the PUMA is the lowest level geographical information available in the PUMS files. However, I wondered if there was some way to make use of the PUMA codes to link each individual to their county of residence? Will I have to gain access to restricted data to accomplish this? Any help is greatly appreciated, as I have been trying to figure this out for a few weeks now.

Look forward to your response

2

You would need to gain access to the restricted data in order to be able to identify county of residence for respondents. Note that our COUNTY variable does map PUMA to COUNTY where possible, but this only identifies county for some residents. One other alternative might be to allocate cases to counties using tables generated through Mable/Geocorr, but this might not be a perfect solution, either.

3

Thanks thats helpful.