I am trying to select households from the 1850-1940 full-count censuses that reside in the counties New York, Westchester, Queens, Kings, Richmond, and Bronx. The problem is that “COUNTYICP” does not appear as a variable available for case selection when I click “Select Cases”. Why am I unable to select cases by COUNTYICP?
If I select cases by city instead, choosing CITY=“New York, NY”, how can I see the boundaries of this city and if the city boundaries are consistent across census years?
Currently COUNTYICP is not supported as a variable for Select Cases. I’ve suggested this to the IPUMS USA team as something that would be useful, especially for users of the full count data, so look for this in a future data release. In the meantime I suggest using STATEICP = 13 (New York) for case selection in the IPUMS extract system and then dropping cases outside those counties after you’ve downloaded the data.
Also note that the county boundaries are not necessarily consistent across your entire time horizon, so be cautious with the counties as well. Please see the description page for COUNTYICP for more info on this.
Regarding city boundaries, at IPUMS we only have data on boundaries for cities going back to 2000 and “places” back to 1980. I’m sure there are other sources which give city boundaries for earlier years (especially for NYC) if you want to go that route.
Thank you! I will drop cases by COUNTYICP after downloading the data.