Apparent metarea errors for Charleston, WV and Charleston, SC

CPS
1

Checking here just in case I’m mistaken (and I couldn’t find any discussion of this previously).

There appears to be a coding error in metarea codes starting in 2016 for the metropolitan areas “Charleston-North Charleston, SC” (1440) and “Charleston, WV” (1480). The codes swap in that year so that Charleston, SC residents are put in the WV metro, while Charleston, WV residents are put in the SC metro. These are totally different metros and the two states share no border.

Here’s some Stata output from 10 years of ASEC data directly via IPUMS:

. table (year) (statefip metarea) if inrange(metarea, 1440,1480) & inrange(year,2010,2019), nototal

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
            |                                           State (FIPS code)                                         
            |                   South Carolina                                      West Virginia                 
            |         Metropolitan area (1990-based code)                Metropolitan area (1990-based code)      
            |  Charleston-North Charleston, SC   Charleston, WV   Charleston-North Charleston, SC   Charleston, WV
------------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Survey year |                                                                                                     
  2010      |                              485                                                                 404
  2011      |                              382                                                                 406
  2012      |                              352                                                                 372
  2013      |                              396                                                                 352
  2014      |                              396                                                                 442
  2015      |                              404                                                                 453
  2016      |                                               425                               403                 
  2017      |                                               466                               393                 
  2018      |                                               461                               384                 
  2019      |                                               456                               379                 
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2

Thank you for letting us know about this issue and helping improve the data for all. I can confirm that these METAREA codes are in fact erroneously switched from 2016-2022. I will share your note with my colleagues who will fix the codes in a future release.

We would also like to thank you for letting us know of this issue, and thereby improving the data for all users, by offering an IPUMS mug as a token of our gratitude. Please email us at ipums@umn.edu with an address where we can ship your mug to and we will send one your way!

3

Glad to help! Thanks, Ivan.