I am trying to produce a table in the analysis tool that shows gross rent by income and race. How do I do this?

I’ve tried variations of hhincome, rentgrs, and race, weighted by household. Every attempt has resulted in this message: “a table is not displayed because the total number of cells would have exceeded the maximum allowed…” I have also tried to restrict the income range (I’m primarily interested in low income households) and deleted race to see if I could just get a result. I have also filtered by pernum(1), although I don’t understand what that does, per the suggestion on another question in this forum. This is the first time I have tried to use this data tool. Ultimately, I want to restrict the results to one state (Nevada) and a few counties and metro areas in that state. Any help is appreciated.

This task is a bit tricky to perform via the online analysis tool. Personally, I’d suggest that this task be completed in a statistical software (Stata, SPSS, SAS, or R) or in Excel with the microdata available through the IPUMS data extract system.

If you prefer to use the online analysis tool, the way to do this is to use the “Comparison of Means” analysis program. In the top left corner, under the “Analysis” button, click the button that says “Comparison of Means”. This feature allows you to calculate means of a continuous variable across a tabulation of discrete variables. RACE is a discrete variable by construction, but you might need to create your own categorical income variable. You will also want to pay attention to the special codes of RENTGRS (e.g. depending on the sample some values indicate the observation is N/A or NIU). This should do the trick. Note that there is extensive documentation and help files in the online analysis tool, available by clicking the “Help” links.