I am working with table DO2010pop.AAB from the 2010 census of the Dominican Republic. This table gives counts of age by sex for single years of age, cross-classified by urban–rural. I have tables for development regions (level-1) and for provinces (level-2).
Recorded ages in the IHGIS extract range as high as 110, and the counts for age=110 in particular appear much too large to be credible. The IPUMS-International documentation indicates that in the census enumeration, both current age and date of birth were gathered, and if age could not be determined, interviewers were to enter a 999 code. (No such code appears in the IHGIS extract, and there is no “age not reported” category.)
Unless the error is on my end (always possible!), this would appear to be a glitch in the conversion of the original printed table to data.
Mark Montgomery
Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention. I downloaded this IHGIS summary table and found that the column labels in the first row of the table are ordered incorrectly. Specifically, the column labels associated with 110 year-olds in the codebook (AAB1000-AAB1008) were incorrectly inserted between column labels AAB100 and AAB101 rather than at the end of the document (i.e., after column AAB999). However, the count values reported in the data (i.e., the second row of the table) were not altered.
This means that the population count listed in AAB100 is the total number of 10 year-olds (as documented in the codebook), but the next column has the incorrect label AAB1000 is listed with a cell that reports the number of 10-year-old males. Because of this error in labeling, the columns labeled AAB1000-AAB1008 are reporting counts for different groups of 10 year-olds and not 110 year-olds. All subsequent columns are also mis-labeled and off by one year (e.g., counts for 11 year-olds in row 2 are being labeled as 10 year-old counts). This error also explains the unexpectedly high number of of 110 year-olds. Here is the section that is causing this error with corrected labels:
AAB100: 10
AAB1000 10 : Males
AAB1001 10 : Females
AAB1002 10 : Urban
AAB1003 10 : Urban : Males
AAB1004 10 : Urban : Females
AAB1005 10 : Rural
AAB1006 10 : Rural : Males
AAB1007 10 : Rural : Females
AAB1008 11
AAB101: 11 : Males
While our data team is working on fixing this error, we would like to offer you an IPUMS mug as a token of our gratitude for helping us improve the data for all. Please reach out to us directly at ipums@umn.edu and let us know where we should ship your mug to!