I am working with IHGIS table DO2010pop.AAB for the Dominican Republic. It provides population counts in single years of age by sex (there is information for development regions and for provinces), further cross-classified by urban and rural.
At reported age=110, we see population counts that are far too high to be credible. Unless the mistake is on my end (always possible!!), this would suggest a glitch in the conversion from the scanned version of the table.
IPUMS-International documentation for this census indicates that interviewers were to ask about both birth date and age. If age could not be determined from either question, the interviewer instructions were to code “999”. There is nothing said in the documentation that suggests reported ages of 110 are treated differently.
Many thanks for taking a look!
Mark Montgomery
Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention. I downloaded this IHGIS summary table and found that the column labels in the first row of the table are ordered incorrectly. Specifically, the column labels associated with 110 year-olds in the codebook (AAB1000-AAB1008) were incorrectly inserted between column labels AAB100 and AAB101 rather than at the end of the document (i.e., after column AAB999). However, the count values reported in the data (i.e., the second row of the table) were not altered.
This means that the population count listed in AAB100 is the total number of 10 year-olds (as documented in the codebook), but the next column has the incorrect label AAB1000 is listed with a cell that reports the number of 10-year-old males. Because of this error in labeling, the columns labeled AAB1000-AAB1008 are reporting counts for different groups of 10 year-olds and not 110 year-olds. All subsequent columns are also mis-labeled and off by one year (e.g., counts for 11 year-olds in row 2 are being labeled as 10 year-old counts). This error also explains the unexpectedly high number of of 110 year-olds. Here is the section that is causing this error with corrected labels:
AAB100: 10
AAB1000 10 : Males
AAB1001 10 : Females
AAB1002 10 : Urban
AAB1003 10 : Urban : Males
AAB1004 10 : Urban : Females
AAB1005 10 : Rural
AAB1006 10 : Rural : Males
AAB1007 10 : Rural : Females
AAB1008 11
AAB101: 11 : Males
While our data team is working on fixing this error, we would like to offer you an IPUMS mug as a token of our gratitude for helping us improve the data for all. Please reach out to us directly at ipums@umn.edu and let us know where we should ship your mug to!
Great catch, and thanks for the temporary work-around!