I’m trying to figure out the amount of language speakers (limited english proficiency, spanish chinese vietnamese arabic german ext) under 125 % of poverty in Iowa. I am using excel, but the numbers I am getting are very low. I am using 2015 ACS, 2015 5 YR ACS, and 2014 5yr ACS. Variables I used are poverty, language, and statefip (19 for Iowa). Anything I could be doing wrong to get these low numbers.
Ex - 4,610 Iowas in poverty 2014 Chinese speakers (this is from the last year’s report)
There are two things that might be at play here.
First, note that Excel limits the number of rows you can have to 1,048,576. From 2005 onward, each year of the ACS includes about 3 million observations (even prior to 2005, from 2001 - 2004, the number of observations exceed Excel’s row limit). In order to address this, you have a few options: (1) you can work with a statistical tool such as Stata, SPSS, SAS, or R, (2) you may want to try the online analysis tool (SDA), or (3) you could reduce your extract to a smaller size by, for example, extracting one year of data at a time and selecting a particular state of interest (i.e. Iowa).
Second, you will want to be sure that you are weighting the data, regardless of which tool you are using. The person weight variable is PERWT and the household weight variable is HHWT.