Hello! I hope this message finds you well.
What does is mean when census_tract_2010 and county_code_2010 are equal to zero? Does this mean that these locations are missing or no longer available? Trying to merge with other data. Thank you very much!
Dear Ryan,
Where are you finding the census_tract_2010 and county_code_2010 attributes? Those attribute names don’t look familiar to me.
Dave Van Riper
IPUMS NHGIS
Hello Dave,
Thank you for your quick response. My mistake, I typed the incorrect variable names from the other dataset I was using. I should have said when tracta and countya are equal to zero.
Thank you.
Ryan
Dear Ryan,
TRACTA and COUNTYA are the names of our variables for tract and county IDs. Those are avaialble in a variety of different datasets. Can you provide me with the dataset and geographic level you downloaded where you’re seeing values of 0 in these fields?
Yours,
Dave
Dear Dave,
Thank you for your response. Yes, I am finding values of 0 in the 5-year ACS when downloading block group level data. When I tab the data in Stata, 0 is an option for them. Does this help or would you like more detail? Thank you.
Ryan
Hi Ryan,
I just downloaded block group data from the 2017-21 ACS dataset and the 2008-12 ACS dataset. When I look at the values for countya and tracta, I don’t find any records with values of 0 in those tables. The smallest value for county a is 001 and the smallest tracta value is 000100.
In your data extract, you will find a text file with the word “codebook” in it. Can you email it to nhgis@umn.edu? I can then recreate your extract exactly and see what may be going on.
Yours,
Dave
Hello Dave,
You are exactly correct. When I was using these data, I was destringing them and they rounded to the number zero. This is my mistake and I see what I have to do now to fix it. Thank you very much for your communication and assistance.
Ryan
Dear Ryan,
Happy to help! Good luck with your project.
Dave