I am using the 2023 5% ACS sample and have downloaded statefip and stateicp and the value of each of these variables is zero for every record in the dataset. Any ideas why this might be and what to do about it?
I suspect the issue with the output you are seeing is that the file has not been decompressed or loaded correctly. It might be helpful to review these instructions for opening IPUMS extracts.
Since our data are compressed and fixed-width files (*.dat.gz), you will need to decompress or unzip them before using them. We recommend 7zip as a free decompression software for Windows and The Unarchiver for Macs. Once you’ve decompressed the file, you will need to input it into a statistical program; the linked instructions provide code for Stata, R, SAS, and SPSS. For R users we provide additional documentation on our ipumrs package website. If necessary, you can find details on how to change the format to .csv (which can be opened in Excel) in this blog post (which also covers decompressing the data).
Thanks for getting back to me. It turns out I had the wrong file name copied and pasted into the do file. I’m sorry to bother you.
Dan Acland, Associate Adjunct Professor, U.C. Berkeley
2607 Hearst Ave, Berkeley, CA 94720
acland@berkeley.edu
+1 (510) 334-5623