Hi. I am using data from 2000-2020 from the American Community Survey to estimate poverty and inequality indicators for New Orleans. I tried to download a 2011 data extract as a .dta file with the variables that I requested (hhincome, race, countyicp, stateicp, hispan) but when I received the extract and unzipped the file, I found that my survey didn’t have any data. It was also smaller than the other annual ACS surveys I had downloaded (about 27 KB compared to 250 KB). Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
It sounds like you restricted your extract to only include persons in households located in Orleans parish using the COUNTYICP variable (in tandem with STATEICP). However, Orleans parish is not identified in the public use versions of the data for 2006-2011 (you can download the list of identified counties for 1950-forward from the COUNTYICP description tab). This is why your data files are empty.
Counties are not identified in public use microdata. Instead, the IPUMS USA team is able to recover the identification of some counties because their geographic boundaries overlap with other identifiable geographic areas. See this blog post for a more detailed discussion. If the goal of your research is to report summary demographic statistics for each county in the US, then you may find the aggregated tables available via IPUMS NHGIS helpful.