Hello. I am trying to identify whether it’s possible to select the most recent 5-Year ACS data such that one can obtain both a national- and a county-level estimate (count or percentage estimate) for the older adult population aged 60 and older living in current Census-defined rural (versus urban) areas? I acknowledge that PUMA-level data may be needed for obtaining a county-level estimate, since some county-level data likely will be suppressed for individuals aged 60 and over. Please let me know if there is a way to best to go about this in selecting IPUMS ACS 5-Year data. Thanks!
I’d recommend you consider using summary data from IPUMS NHGIS. NHGIS provides 5-year ACS summary tables with significantly more geographic detail than what’s in the public use microdata available through IPUMS USA.
With the microdata, the lowest level of identified geography is PUMAs, and PUMAs do not correspond at all well with the Census-defined rural/urban areas. As such, it’s not possible to distinguish rural population in microdata using the official Census definition.
ACS summary data, on the other hand, does distinguish urban and rural populations using the Census definitions. Through NHGIS, you could get the 2023 5-year ACS Sex by Age table (table B01001) and select a “breakdown” for Rural, which would limit the output data to only population living in rural areas. (We explain the concept of breakdowns in the NHGIS FAQs here.) Unfortunately, there’s no data for the Rural breakdown at the county level in ACS summary files, but it is available for states, divisions, regions, and the whole nation, so you could, for example, distinguish population age 60 and over in rural areas by state.
You could also separately get the Sex by Age table for all counties, and then distinguish those counties by their metropolitan status, considering the non-metropolitan counties to be “rural.” To determine which counties are metropolitan or not, you can use the Census Bureau’s CBSA delineation files.
If you’d like more guidance with using NHGIS, see the videos and guide available through the NHGIS User Guide page.
If you do choose to use IPUMS USA microdata, I’d suggest using the DENSITY variable to distinguish population into lower- and higher-density groups as a proxy for rural/urban designations, or you could use the PCTMETRO variable to distinguish populations by whether the majority of their PUMA’s population is metropolitan or not.