Help compiling data tables from IPUMS data base

1

Hello,

I am having trouble compiling data tables from the IPUMS data base. I need data tables for USA state-level demographic characteristics for the youth population over the years 1994-2012 that I can input into programmes such as Stata and SPSS. I am looking for individual state and year data on ‘proportion of children living under the poverty line’, ‘proportion of children that are hispanic’, ‘proportion of children that are black’, ‘proportion of population aged 12-17’, ‘Proportion of children who are male/female’ and ‘proportion of children in one parent households’.

I am a student in the UK and require the data for my dissertation but am struggling to navigate the website and access the data I need. Is anyone able to help me compile the data or suggest resources that could be helpful?

Thank you very much for your help in advance,

Josh

2

If you are interested in state-level data only, I recommend checking out another MPC project: NHGIS. NHGIS offers many of the official Census tables going back to 1790 at several geographic levels, including state. While NHGIS is primarily focused on mapping data, the summary tables can be extracted independent of shape files as .csv files with optional descriptive headers. Additionally, the Census’ American FactFinder site is another source for Census tables.

If tables for any of the specific state-level statistics you mentioned are not available through NHGIS, it is possible to estimate them using the IPUMS-USA person-level microdata. To familiarize yourself with this data, I recommend reading the FAQ and watching the online tutorials. For further assistance, you can always contact us by emailing ipums@umn.edu.

Hope this helps.