County

Hi Michelle,

Thank you for answering my question regarding county-level data using IPUMS USA. Is county-level data essentially only available for the geographies listed in the “counties_1950_on” spreadsheet by combining the state, county, and countyfips codes?

Thank you,

Gina

COUNTY (or COUNTYFIPS) is a state dependent variable so either must be read in combination with one of the STATE variables (STATEICP or STATEFIP). In other words, when creating your extract/conducting your analysis, you can include either of the county variables and either of the state variables. If, for example, you were interested in Fresno, CA. You can see in the excel spreadsheet that data on this county is available from 1950 onwards, so analyzing your data you would want to identify observations with STATEFIP == 6 & COUNTY == 190.