Historic US census - 1930

#Documentation

The Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) Complete Count Data include more than 650 million individual-level and 7.5 million household-level records. The microdata are the result of collaboration between IPUMS and the nation’s two largest genealogical organizations—Ancestry.com and FamilySearch—and provides the largest and richest source of individual level and household data.

Historic data are scarce and often only exists in aggregate tables. The key advantage of the IPUMS data is the availability of individual and household level characteristics that researchers can tabulate in ways that benefits their specific research questions. The data contain demographic variables, economic variables, migration variables and family variables. Within households, it is possible to create relational data as all relations between household members are known. For example, having data on the mother and her children in a household enables researchers to calculate the mother’s age at birth. Another advantage of the Complete Count data is the possibility to follow individuals over time using a historical identifier.

In sum: the IPUMS data are a unique source for research on social and economic change and can provide population health researchers with information about social and economic determinants.

The IPUMS 1930 census data was collected in April 1930. Enumerators collected data traveling to households and counting the residents who regularly slept at the household. Individuals lacking permanent housing were counted as residents of the place where they were when the data was collected. Household members absent on the day of data collected were either listed to the household with the help of other household members or were scheduled for the last census subdivision.

**Notes**

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- We provide IPUMS household and person data separately so that it is convenient to explore the descriptive statistics on each level. In order to obtain a full dataset, merge the household and person on the variables SERIAL and SERIALP. In order to create a longitudinal dataset, merge datasets on the variable HISTID.

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- Households with more than 60 people in the original data were broken up for processing purposes. Every person in the large households are considered to be in their own household. The original large households can be identified using the variable SPLIT, reconstructed using the variable SPLITHID, and the original count is found in the variable SPLITNUM.

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- Coded variables derived from string variables are still in progress. These variables include: occupation and industry.

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- IPUMS has allocated missing observations and edited some inconsistencies for the following variables: SPEAKENG, YRIMMIG, CITIZEN, AGEMARR, AGE, BPL, MBPL, FBPL, LIT, SCHOOL, OWNERSHP, FARM, EMPSTAT, OCC1950, IND1950, MTONGUE, MARST, RACE, SEX, RELATE, CLASSWKR. The flag variables indicating an allocated observation for the associated variables can be included in your extract by clicking the ‘Select data quality flags’ box on the extract summary page.

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- Most inconsistent information was not edited for this release, thus there are observations outside of the universe for some variables. In particular, the variables GQ, and GQTYPE have known inconsistencies and will be improved with the next release.

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