Hi,
I have been reviewing this Number of Records page.
Do these counts represent 100% of households that respond to the CPS, and 100% of individuals listed as living in those households? Or is the IPUMS microdata itself a sample of the survey sample?
I’ve seen a couple sources say the monthly CPS sample is ~66k households and ~110k individuals, which seems relatively close to these monthly record counts.
Thank you!
Yes, the IPUMS CPS microdata contains 100% of the households that respond to the CPS and all of the individuals identified as residing in those households. This is documented in CPS technical paper 77, which states in chapter 1-4 that the public-use microdata files “contain records of the responses to the survey questionnaire for all respondents in the survey”. It should be noted, however, that about a third of households included in the household count are not actually interviewed. The total number of household records on the number of records page includes housing units that did not have any persons in the housing unit at the time of the interview. For example, in the August 2023 CPS, the 101,315 persons present all resided in one of the 42,831 interviewed households. The remaining housing units that make up the 69,446 figure in the number of records page includes 17,272 housing units where residents either refused the interview or were temporarily absent, and 9,343 housing units which were vacant, occupied by persons ineligible for interview, demolished, converted to storage or business use, or included in the sample by mistake. This is documented in the variable HHINTYPE and vacant units are directly identified in the ASEC in the variable GQ. Data on non-interviewed households is not available in person-level user extracts since there are no respondents to link these records to. In order to obtain data on non-interviewed households, users should select to get the data in a hierarchical format from the extract request page (after selecting to create their data extract),