How do I restrict Birthplace to specific countries?

I am interested in the Birthplace and Years in the US variables. However, I would prefer to limit the birthplaces to countries in Central and South America and the Caribbean. Is it possible to do this?

It is possible to do this using the ‘Select Cases’ functionality on the BPL or BPLD (detailed version of BPL) variables.

The ‘Select Cases’ feature allows users to limit their dataset to contain only records with specific values for selected variables, such as persons age 65 and older. Multiple variables can be used in combination during case selection. Selections for multiple variables are additive, each being implicitly connected by a logical “AND” for processing purposes. You can only perform case selection on either the general or the detailed version of a variable, not both.

Simply extracting selected cases can be too crude, however, because you may need the persons who co-resided with your selected population. Accordingly, the case selection function also lets you choose to include everyone living in a household with a person with the selected characteristics.

Users should be careful with the case selection feature. It is possible to select a specific variable category (e.g., polygamous marriage) that does not exist across all the samples in your extract, thereby inadvertently excluding those samples from your dataset.

Please see the Extract Instructions PDF for more details on using this functionality:

https://usa.ipums.org/usa/resources/i…