At least some tables lack county subdivision data for the state of Wisconsin in 1980. An example is table DD5 (“Sex by Marital Status by Age”). I was surprised by this because time series table A34 includes Wisconsin county subdivision information in both 1970 and 1990. Did the Census Bureau simply not publish a WI county subdivision breakdown of this table?
Other tables, including DS104 do include Wisconsin county subdivisions.
Dear John,
Thank you for reaching out! We’ve determined that we only have data for county subdivisions up through North Dakota in ds106 (1980 Census: STF 2b - 100% Detailed Data with Race/Ethnicity Breakdown). We are currently doing some digging into why that’s the case, and we’ll update this forum post with more information as we find it.
Sincerely,
Dave Van Riper
Thanks for the quick response, Dave. I’m curious to hear what you learn. If this data is available, it’d certainly be of interest to me.
Dear John,
Based on my investigation, we only have county subdivision data up through North Dakota in ds106 (1980 Census: STF 2b - 100% Detailed Data with Race/Ethnicity Breakdown) and ds111 (1980 Census: STF 4Pb - Sample-Based Detailed Population Data with Race/Ethnicity Breakdown). I looked back at some archived version of NHGIS data, and it appears as if we’ve been missing county subdivision for Ohio - Wyoming in those datasets for a long time!
Unfortunately, it is a big undertaking to add these missing states to those particular data files. If you’re interested, you can actually download the 1980 STF2 state files from the Census Bureau’s FTP site. You could then use the 1980 STF2 technical document to write custom code to extract the data you need. The 1980 STF files have multiple physical records for each “logical record” (e.g., data for a single county subdivision in Wisconsin). Unfortunately, that makes the programming more complicated.
I’m sorry I don’t have better news for you!
Sincerely,
Dave Van Riper