Is it possibel to use ipums data in R?

1

I don’t have access to other software besides R. I was wondering if there was a command file to use the .DAT file in R, or if there was a way to adjust one of the other files to use in R.

Thanks

2

While we do not provide support for using IPUMS data in R, it is possible, and some users do use R to analyze IPUMS data. One common approach is to request a CSV file from us (click ‘change’ to the right of ‘data format’ before submitting your extract request). Then, users often import into a database such as SQLite using a package such as sqldf. You can find a general code template for doing this here.

3

Here’s what I do:

(1) choose “STATA” as “data format” in, for example, https://usa.ipums.org/usa-action/extr…

(2) in R:

library(foreign)

df <- read.dta(“ipums_filename.dta”)

This reads the ipums file into a dataframe named “df”.

4

Updating this old post in case it comes up in searches for R support in IPUMS.
We now provide IPUMS support for R. The ipumsr package allows you to read data from your IPUMS extract into R along with the associated metadata like variable labels, value labels and more.
The package is available through CRAN with instructions here:
https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ipumsr/vignettes/ipums.html