What data do you want?

There are a variety of ways to have identified what you need, but the gist is that you can browse through how the variables are organized, use an A-Z index, or a search through the variable names and descriptions. Hopefully by this point in the group project process, the variable identification process is more or less complete.

How do you get the data from IPUMS?

A good analogy of the IPUMS website interface is online shopping: you’re working to identify the variables you want, you put them in your cart, select which years/samples you want, and then submit the extract (i.e., “checking out” or “buying” what’s in your cart).

How do you get the data into RStudio?

Once your data extract has been processed, you need to download two files - a data file and a codebook - and then use the ipumsr package to bring those data into R/RStudio.

The ipumsr package has helpful vignettes that introduces this process and has helpful screen shots of what you need.

Here’s a video I made walking through these steps.