Hi, I am trying to compute the median personal earnings for specific immigrant groups; however, the analysis states that there are too many cells for personal earnings variables. Can anyone please help!
Unfortunately, it is not possible for the online analysis tool to generate the median if the number of cells exceeds the limit. You could restrict your table to an interval of earnings that does not generate too many cells and then repeat this process with non-overlapping intervals (i.e. incearn(*-50000), incearn(51000-100000), etc.) until you have generated data for the full sample. Once you have the full sample represented, it is possible to determine the median income, as this will be the earnings value associated with the midpoint of the weighted population.
Alternatively, since the IPUMS-USA project provides microdata, it is probably easier to download an extract and manipulate the data in a statistical software package. You can also download the data in CSV format, which can be read into Excel. Keep in mind that very large files may be truncated due to Excel’s row limits. IPUMS-USA has a number of video tutorials that walk user’s through the process of creating, extracting, and opening a data file. Once the data has been read into your statistical software package or Excel, you can calculate medians.
Hope this helps.