Help compacting data?

INTERNATIONAL
1

Hi (again),
(Thanks for all your replies!)

Is it possible to get help compacting the censuses?

I have difficulties accessing sufficient memory capacity to work with the large populations. At the same time we are interested in the prevalence of the unusual combinations of characteristics so that we don’t want to work on subsamples.

I can do the analyses we need with a dataset with frequencies of individuals observed with different combinations of values across 12 variables. (See, e.g., the Stata command ‘contract’.)

We need such tables for 29 historical censuses and 65 censuses from Europe and North America.

I’d be happy to prepare code if that would be any help. If it’s possible for a fee that would also be of interest.

All the best,
Stefan

2

The IPUMS User Support team is available to address questions about our data and documentation; however, we do not assist individual users with analysis or data manipulation requests even for a fee. Note that occasionally IPUMS research staff will take on these types of projects outside of their official role with IPUMS on a contract basis. You may use the select cases feature of the IPUMS extract system, work with subsets of each data file one by one, store your data on an external hard drive, use the online data analysis tool, or take advantage of any computing resources available at your place of work. Feel free to contact ipums@umn.edu for a discussion of alternate strategies for your specific application.