It appears that the CPS microdata includes the respondent’s previous state of residence, but I was unable to find information on the previous county of residence. Our goal is to learn more about why people are leaving a particular region within our state.
This question will be difficult to answer using CPS data. There is no migration variable that identifies the previous county of residence. This is largely due to the reality that the CPS sample is relatively small and due to confidentiality restrictions less than half of each sample are found to live in a county that can be identified in the public use data. An alternative data source you may want to check out is the ACS data available through the IPUMS USA project. The ACS sample is much larger and is often much more useful for researchers looking into migration.
I hope this helps.
Thank you very much for your response. I initially started out using the ACS data, but I don’t believe the survey asks respondents why they migrated like the CPS does.
By the way, this is a tremendous resource. Thank you so much for all of the hard work that goes into maintaining it.