How to interpret certain results

1

Hi. My question may be rather rudimentary.

Take a table like this:

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The entire US population in 2019 was (per google) 328.2 million. The sum of the entire right-hand column pictured above doesn’t surpass 4.5 million. I see “codes and frequencies” – is the right column just iterating the number of respondents to this question of the questionnaire?

And if so, is there a way to get from here to a table that shows, say, the estimated percentages of all of the US population for each of these labels (or something similar)? (I know I could divide by the total myself, but this is just one finding example, and I am also supposing there may already be such tables or ways to make such tables within the site.)

And how would I begin to look at these kinds of numbers at smaller geographies?

Thank you!

2

You are correct that the frequencies listed on the “Codes” tab is the unweighted count of the responses for a given sample. To get representative counts or percentages you need to apply sample weights. IPUMS USA provides an online tabulator that you can use to generate these estimates; I am linking a brief video tutorial on using the tabulator as well as some sample exercises (see the Online/SDA Exercises column for USA) that will walk you through how to use the tabulator. Alternatively, if you are interested purely in tabular data, you may prefer to use IPUMS NHGIS, which provides summary file data from the Census Bureau and allows for identification of much smaller geographic units than the individual-level microdata from IPUMS USA.