Dear IPUMS team,
The international recode “edattain” for Ireland (1971 and especially 1981) seems implausible to me.
For example, in 1981, only 87 people out of 344,291 completed university.
I found some information about the data harmonisation (https://international.ipums.org/international-action/variables/EDATTAIN#comparability_section).
Does any further data documentation exist, which explains why the given categories were chosen (e.g. 4 years of tertiary education = university completed)? And is it possible to access the data that was used to derived “edattain”?
Thank you!
Julia
Thanks for this note. I’ve spent some time talking with the IPUMS International Team about this and we all agree that these frequencies do not seem quite right.
The IPUMS International Team constructs EDATTAIN and EDUCIE from years of schooling in primary, secondary, vocational, and tertiary levels. The challenge is that people reporting tertiary may also report primary/secondary years of schooling. Also, people may only report tertiary or secondary even though they clearly also attained lower level of education. This complicates the programming for the harmonization of this variable. Based on our discussions, the IPUMS International Team re-designed the programming for EDATTAIN for IE1971A and IE1981A. This re-design will show up on the live IPUMS International website with the next data release.
Another complication is that the number of unknown cases varies across the source variables. For example, in Ireland 1981, tertiary has more unknown cases than secondary, while secondary has more unknown cases than primary. This is also true in 1971. The differences in unknown cases are not trivial and they could be an explanation to the relatively lower than expected educational attainment.
The new frequency distributions for educational attainment still look slightly low compared to other samples, specifically for secondary and post-secondary education. Unfortunately, this is a problem that is likely explained by the large number of unknown cases existing in the data and is not fixable by the IPUMS International Team. The IPUMS International Team will add a note about this in the comparability section for EDATTAIN Ireland.
Thank you very much for the explanation and for addressing this issue!
Could you let me know when I can expect the next data release?
The IPUMS International Team aims to release new data on an annual basis. Typically, this release occurs in the summer months. Outside of any unexpected delays, I expect this to be the same this year.
Hi, I just downloaded the newly released data. To me it seems like the harmonization of the variable did not change. Secondary and tertiary levels are still almost not existent in 1971 and 1981. Is this really only due to the number of unknown cases or was the harmonization not re-designed?
You are correct that the updated harmonization for this variable was not included in the most recent data release. Thanks for bringing it to our attention. The IPUMS International team is aware of the omission and will add the fix to the live site in the coming weeks.
Additionally, we should have offered you a mug for identifying the error in EDATTAIN. If you contact ipums@umn.edu directly with a mailing address, we would like to send a mug your way to thank you for helping us improve IPUMS International.
That is great, thank you!
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