I am hoping to extract a dataset that captured people living at 130% of poverty level, in a specific county, state and nationwide, over a 5-year period.
Does anyone have a link to a tutorial or guidance as to how I would do that?
Thanks for any help.
I’m not sure that I totally understand your question, but I’ll do my best to provide some guidance. Please feel free to ask further questions if my response is not helpful.
First, it isn’t clear to me what you mean by over a 5-year period. Are you looking for a measure of how many people were living at that level at any point over the period? Or, are you looking for something else? Which years are you interested in? Data from one of the 5-year American Community Survey files may be what you are looking for, but I’m not sure.
You can obtain 5-year ACS data in summary form (like published counts) through NHGIS. One problem that you might run into is that the summary data use categories like 100-124% and 125-149%. These counts would not work for you if you need data specifically about the 130% level. Further, it may be the case that you are only able to obtain family-level data.
The 5-year ACS files are available in microdata form through IPUMS-USA. Microdata are individual-level records, which would allow you the flexibility to compute statistics using the 130% level. However, not all counties are identified in the microdata. You can find a spreadsheet of the identifiable counties here.
I hope this provides a good start. Like I said, please ask further questions if anything isn’t clear.