I am wondering if it possible to link ACS microdata downloaded from IPUMS with data downloaded through the Census PUMS? From the documentation, I see that every person can be uniquely identified with SAMPLE, CBSERIAL, and CBPERNUM. Presumably, CBSERIAL and CBPERNUM match records assigned by the Census Bureau, but I’m not sure if there is a way to obtain / construct SAMPLE in the PUMS data.
Thank you!
You are correct that CBSERIAL (SERIALNO) and CBPERNUM (SPORDER) report the Census Bureau versions of the unique within-sample identifiers for households and within-household identifiers for persons (this is in contrast to the IPUMS-generated unique identifiers SERIAL and PERNUM, which do not map onto the Census Bureau identifiers). The reason IPUMS includes the SAMPLE variable is because the IPUMS data access system makes it easy to combine multiple samples into a single data file. If you are accessing the data directly from the Census Bureau, you will need to download sample-specific files; therefore, there should be no need to create the SAMPLE variable in the original Census PUMS.