Census--spatial links: Benin samples and Bangladesh 2011

INTERNATIONAL
1

I’ve seen two glitches in linking census microsample data to the spatial files. The glitches show up at the second administrative level.

(1) In seeking to link level-2 administrative identifiers in the Benin samples to the corresponding year-specific (not spatially harmonized) shapefiles, I’m finding that for each year “yyyy”, the GEO2_BJyyyy identifier in the census data does not match to IPUMSyyyy in the shapefile (after GEO2_BJyyyy has been left-padded with zeroes). Instead, GEO2_BJyyyy matches directly (without any padding) to the shapefile’s commune identifier COMNyyyy.

(2) For level-2 administrative identifiers in the Bangladesh 2011 sample, there are discrepancies between the census GEO2_BD2011 codes in Rangpur Division (55) and the IPUM2011 code in the 2011 (not spatially harmonized) level-2 shapefile. The level-2 codes in other divisions look just fine: with the usual left-padding, GEO2_BD2011 matches IPUM2011 in the level-2 shapefile perfectly everywhere other than Rangpur.

2

Thank you for bringing these issues to our attention, you have indeed found an error with the 2nd administrative level, year-specific Benin and Bangladesh samples in which the geographic identifier field in the shapefiles do not match the geographic identifier field in the microdata. The IPUMS International team is currently working on updating the shapefiles to match the microdata, which should be available later this week. As a token of our appreciation to you for using the year-specific shapefiles and alerting us to these errors, we would like to send you an IPUMS Mug. Please email ipums@umn.edu with the best shipping address for us to send it to.

3

Thanks, Grace, as always!

I’m working through 225 microsamples (all from low-income countries), checking for census-spatial matching issues at all the admin levels we have available. This’ll be done by next week. If it helps, I would be glad to share the results and the R program.

Rather than going through the User Forum, should I instead send emails and attachments to the address you’re using (ipums@discoursemail.com)?

4

The corrected shapefiles are now available on the Year-Specific Second-Level Geography page. Thank you for offering to share the code and results of your census-spatial matching analysis! I would be happy to send them to the IPUMS International team. Please send emails and attachments to the IPUMS email ipums@umn.edu.