Hi, I’m trying to obtain your data just for the Lexington-Fayette KY metropolitan area. But that metro area does not appear in the “Select Cases” list for MET2013. What am I doing wrong? Can I obtain it some other way? Thank you
Metropolitan areas are not explicitly identified in the public use microdata files (which are the input for IPUMS USA) released by the Census Bureau. The lowest level geography available is the PUMA (public use microdata area). IPUMS geographers identify other low-level geographic units (e.g., counties, metropolitan areas) where possible based on coterminous boundaries between these areas and PUMAs. First, they identify PUMAs that overlap with the metropolitan area and also have a majority of their population residing within the metropolitan area. Then, they determine the sum of errors from omission (persons who reside in the Lexington-Fayette metro but we would not include–because they reside in PUMAs that are not Lexington-Fayette-majority PUMAs) and comission (persons who do NOT live in the metro but whom we would include as they reside in PUMAs that are majority-Lexington-Fayette PUMAs). If the sum of error is less than 15% of the metropolitan area’s population, IPUMS USA will identify the metropolitan area in MET2013. If you look at the PUMA Match Summary by MSA for 2012 and later ACS/PRCS samples at the bottom of the MET2013 description tab, you will see that the sum of omission and comission errors for Lexington-Fayette, KY is 21.7%; this means that the PUMAs do not align closely enough with the metropolitan area boundaries for us to identify this area.
Depending on your application, you may be interested in summary or tabular data via IPUMS NHGIS, which will identify a more comprehensive (i.e., including metropolitan areas like Lexington) and detailed (e.g., down to the Census tract in some cases) set of geographic units.