I’m trying to recreate a data set I found. I’m new to IPUMS and having trouble extracting the data. I’m trying to find immigrant head of household (or adults or civilian population) county of birth for counties within a state.
Before getting into some of the specific details of your needs, I’ll provide some general resources that may be useful to you as a new IPUMS user. First, we have several online video tutorials. These discuss topics such as using the extract system and downloading data. Second, we have a FAQ page that addresses many common questions and links to other existing resources. Of course, you can always email ipums@umn.edu with specific questions about IPUMS data.
Regarding your specific question. It sounds like you should be able to create your data set by selecting the following variables: The birthplace variable (BPL) will help identify immigrants and country of birth. Household heads can be identified via the RELATE variable. A RELATE code of 01 indicates that the individual is the householder. Finally, counties within states can be identified via the COUNTYFIPS and STATEFIP. Do note that not all counties are identifiable in public use data. For more information on this detail, see this blog post.