Hi again,
I used the IPUMS raceeth data to collect information about racial and ethnic minorities as a proportion of individuals under 125% of poverty in Iowa. However, when I did this, the data did not align well with the data my organization has collected. For example, my organization calculated that approximately 30.5% of the population was African American, whereas IPUMS calculated this value to be 44.1%. I used the online SDA analysis and used the 5 year 2017-2021 ACS data. Does anyone have suggestion on how to get data that is more reflective to the results my organization is collecting? Would there be a significant difference in using the 5 year vs. 1 year ACS? Any insight would be greatly appreciated!
raceeth is a variable created by another user in the online analysis tool that uses responses from RACE and HISPAN; it codes respondents of any race who reported being Hispanic into a Latino category. For example, someone who identified as Black and Hispanic will be coded as Latino and will not be included in the non-Hispanic Black category. Using this variable in combination with POVERTY and STATEFIP in the online analysis tool (see screenshot below), I’m finding that non-hispanic Blacks form 9.4% of the proportion of individuals under 125% of poverty in Iowa. This corresponds to 43,548 individuals from a total of 114,523, or around 38% of the total non-hispanic Black population of Iowa. This is within the margin of error of the official Census ACS data table which reports that 38.4% (with a 2.3% margin of error) of the state population that identifies as only Black or African American earns less than 125% of the poverty line. I recommend reviewing the variable description for POVERTY to note how it is constructed to determine if it’s comparable to the data your organization collected.
Using the IPUMS raw data extract for the 2021 ACS 5yr sample, I am getting essentially-identical estimates for the population of Black, non-Hispanic people under 125% of the poverty level in Iowa that @Ivan_Strahof obtains using SDA*. Black non-Hispanic people being approximately 9.4% of the under-125% poverty line population, and Black non-Hispanic people under-125% of the poverty line being approx. 38% of the Black non-Hispanic population in the state.
Since you asked about whether the ACS 1-year sample might obtain different estimates, the answer is the percentage does not change significantly. I get Black, non-Hispanic people under 125% of the poverty line (39,784) as 8.6% of that poverty-line population (462,964), and 35% of that race/ethnicity population (113, 459).
Based on this information, I would wonder if your organization obtains different numbers from the Census because the sample year is different than the ones we use; 2021 ACS 1-year estimates are slightly less than 5-year, perhaps it was from an earlier year? Another explanation would be your organization looked at a sub-sample the Black, non-Hispanic population.
*I get very slightly different numbers for the sub-125% of the poverty line population-- 43,072 Black non-Hispanic individuals from 455,634 people under 125% of the poverty line. The same percentages as Ivan, but I wonder why this population doesn’t perfectly line-up like the estimate of the Black non-Hispanic population. I imagine if the 1-year ACS with that SDA variable were used, the numbers I gave for that sample similarly might not perfectly agree but occupy the same ball-park.
