I’m using PUMAs as my geographic unit of analysis for a project using the ACS2012 5 year file. I know that the PUMA codes are state dependent, so I’ve created a unique puma id by combining them with the statefips variable, using the following r code:
fam$pumaid = paste(as.numeric(fam$statefip), as.numeric(as.character(fam$puma)), sep=“-”).
This gives me an ID code with the following format: “[statefip code] - [puma code]”. My problem is that this returns 3344 unique IDs, whereas there are only 2378 PUMAs. Any idea what I’m doing wrong?
Thanks so much for your help!