Hi IPUMS support–thank you so much for all that you do! I’m so thankful that we can consult experts on using your valuable datasets.
I am using 2022 ACS data for a project in which I am trying to get joint distributions of race, sex, and occupations of people on a county and state basis. I like this dataset because I can construct detailed conditional probabilities (for example, getting the distribution of occupations for white males in Georgia).
Admittedly, I am new to this field of data analysis. In order to check whether I was using the data correctly, I looked into race distributions according to state, and was wondering why there might be certain discrepancies against census data or whether I am doing something totally wrong. For example, I am getting this for this percent distribution in Hawaii.
IPUMS 2022 ACS PERWTs:*
White: 87.0%
Census 2023 1-year estimate ACS:
White: 21.9%
*For context, I am basically summing up all the PERWTs for all residents for a given state. Then, I am summing up all the PERWTs for all residents of a given race in that state, and dividing that by the state’s PERWT sum to derive the percentage.
Please let me know if there are data-collection-related issues, or it is likely that I am calculating these percentages incorrectly. Maybe I should look at an alternative dataset? Thank you so much!