ASEC individual weighting on popstat not adding up

Hello,

I’m trying to get a total count of population in the ASEC (using this because it has full metfips for merging purposes).

The popstat variable is 1=adult, 2=military and 3=child. I thought simply transforming all popstat=1 and then multiplying by the weight (asecwt) would give me the population, but when I collapse it all down into a single year, I’m getting numbers around 300,000,000 across the board (with it getting higher the further I go back from 2018 to 2000).

What am I doing wrong?

Thank you!

I am not able to exactly figure out what the issue is here. It sounds like you might be doing this analysis in Excel. If so, note that the maximum number of rows allowed in Excel is 1,048,576. So, this could lead to a truncation of your data set. Additionally, for simple statistics like this, you can always double check your results by using the online analysis tool. This tool will automatically incorporate the sampling weights properly into your calculations. An final detail to keep be aware of is the experimental redesign in the 2014 ASEC sample. More details about this topic are available here.