This chapter includes sources for social, economic, and demographic data on people and households. Some of the most useful databases for topics such as these are general-purpose databases, such as American FactFinder or UNdata (see chapter 2). The databases listed below specifically focus on demography (including vital statistics, which count births and deaths as well as international migration), on the expenditures made by individuals and households, and on the socioeconomic status (education, occupation, income, etc.) of individuals and households. Additional sources for data about the wage and salary income of people can be found in chapter 12.
Major Sources: United States
Census Bureau (U.S. Department of Commerce)
Bureau of Labor Statistics (U.S. Department of Labor)
American Community Survey (ACS, www.census.gov/acs/www/). This Census Bureau project surveys more than 250,000 residents of the United States each month. These monthly samples are then combined into one-year, three-year, or five-year groupings to estimate the characteristics of the American population during that one-year, three-year, or five-year period. The questions on the survey cover basic demographics (age, gender, race, ethnicity, ancestry, marital status, children, etc.) as well as educational attainment, income, and employment. Less common topics covered by the ACS include transportation (including the number of vehicles possessed by the household and detailed information about commuting methods and times); whether the person moved in the past year and, if so, where they moved from (within the same county, within the same state, or from a different state); whether the person has any disability; what languages are spoken in the household; and each person’s citizenship and immigration history. ACS also includes questions about the house itself, including the year it was built, the number of rooms, what fuel is used to heat it, and measures of its affordability. The five-year estimates from the ACS are available for very small geographic areas—as small as individual Census tracts—but the one-year and three-year estimates are available only for larger areas, those with populations over 65,000 and 20,000, respectively. It is important to note that, unlike the statistics produced by the Decennial Census, these are all estimates, which means that they have a margin of error—sometimes a fairly large one, especially for small geographic areas. Aggregate ACS data is available through multiple interactive online interfaces, including American FactFinder (http://factfinder2.census.gov, covered in chapter 2) and the Integrated Public Use Microdata System (IPUMS, https://usa.ipums.org/; see appendix B for more information on working with the SDA software used by IPUMS).
Current Population Survey (www.bls.gov/cps/). This survey, conducted by the Census Bureau on behalf of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), is one of the best sources for socioeconomic data on individuals and households in the United States. It provides the raw data behind many common statistics, most notably the unemployment rate. The core questions on the Current Population Survey—basic demographic, educational, and employment information are asked every month, and then supplemental sets of questions are asked one month per year. The Annual Social and Economic (ASEC) supplement, sometimes called the “March supplement” since it is administered every March, asks detailed questions about how much education people have completed, what kind of job they have, how many hours they work per week, how much they earn, whether they receive certain government benefits and the value of those benefits, their health insurance status, how much they paid in federal and state taxes, and other questions related to the household’s income and expenses. Because of this, it is a favorite source among people with an interest in researching economic inequality, employment discrimination, poverty, and similar topics. Some aggregate data from the Current Population Survey is available on the BLS site (www.bls.gov/cps/). Users who need aggregate data not available from the BLS can use the IPUMS to create tables from CPS data, 1962 to present, in an interactive online interface, after completing a free registration (https://cps.ipums.org/cps/; see appendix B for more information on working with the SDA software used by IPUMS). For the most advanced uses, raw CPS data can be downloaded from the Census Bureau (http://thedataweb.rm.census.gov/ftp/cps_ftp.html), 1994 to present, or from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), 1962 to present (www.nber.org/data/current-population-survey-data.html).
Consumer Expenditure Survey (www.bls.gov/cex/). This survey is also conducted by the Census Bureau on behalf of the BLS. Its focus, as its name suggests, is consumer spending: how much money do Americans spend on food, clothing, shelter, transportation, health care, education, entertainment, and the like? Tables containing this data are available from 1984 to present. Spending data is available broken down by many individual and household variables, including number of people in the household; region in which the household is located; whether the household is in a rural or urban area; income of the household; and age, race, gender, education level, and occupational category of the “reference person” (the person who owns or rents the dwelling for the household). Microdata from the Consumer Expenditure Survey is also freely available online (www.bls.gov/cex/pumdhome.htm), after a 2012 change in procedures. As of the time of this writing, only the 2004–2011 microdata was available online, but eventually the data should be available 1996 to present, with a one-year lag.
American Time Use Survey (ATUS, www.bls.gov/tus). Carried out by the Census Bureau under the sponsorship of the BLS, this survey asks Americans 15 years and older how much time they spent on a single, selected day carrying out activities in dozens of categories, including sleeping, working for pay, volunteering, watching television, exercising, and doing many separate kinds of domestic tasks: caring for children, caring for adults in the household, grocery shopping, preparing food, caring for one’s lawn and garden, and exterior maintenance on one’s house. Because this data set has such detailed breakdowns of domestic activities, it is a favorite among researchers and pundits interested in gender inequality in the amount of time spent doing this sort of unpaid work. As with the other BLS/Census Bureau surveys, data is available both in tables and charts and as freely available microdata, 2003 to present.
National Center for Health Statistics (U.S. Centers for Disease Control)
The major official demographic data source for the United States is the National Center for Health Statistics’ National Vital Statistics System (www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss.htm), which collects and disseminates birth and death data from administrative records, namely, birth and death certificates. This data is available in a variety of ways, including published tables and an interactive database called VitalStats. It is a particularly strong source for data on fertility rates and on the deaths of fetuses and infants.
Major Sources: World
National and Regional Sites
Many countries conduct household surveys that focus on socioeconomic status (income, expenditure, social inclusion, etc.), but very few of them make the microdata from those surveys freely available as the U.S. Census Bureau does with the Current Population Survey and the Consumer Expenditure Survey. Among the countries and international organizations that make available English-language aggregate data on household incomes and expenditures are the following:
• The European Commission includes detailed aggregate data from its European Union Labour Force Survey and Household Budget Surveys in the Eurostat database (http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat; see chapter 2). Eurostat also contains some data from time-use surveys.
• In the United Kingdom, a great deal of aggregate data from the Expenditure and Food Survey, Family Resources Survey, Labour Force Survey, and other household surveys can be downloaded from the website of the Office for National Statistics (www.ons.gov.uk/ons/datasets-and-tables/index.html).
• For Australia, the aggregate data from the Household Expenditure Survey and the Survey of Income and Housing is available from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (www.abs.gov.au).
• New Zealand allows the interactive creation of tables for data from its Household Economic Survey through the NZ.Stat online tool (www.stats.govt.nz, “Browse for stats” tab).
Census Bureau (U.S. Department of Commerce)
The U.S. Census Bureau’s International Programs (www.census.gov/population/international/data/index.html) includes several demographic data resources, most notably the International Data Base (IDB). The IDB provides demographic data for hundreds of countries, territories (e.g., American Samoa, British Virgin Islands), and regions (e.g., Micronesia, Caribbean). Available data sets include population, both total and broken down by age and gender; rate of population growth; data about births, including number, rate per 1,000 population, and births per woman; data about mortality, including life expectancy, infant mortality, and number and rate of deaths; and data about the number of migrants and rate of migration. This database includes both historic data going back to 1950 and projections that currently go out to 2050.
United Nations Statistics Division
The United Nations Statistics Division publishes the annual Population and Vital Statistics Report (http://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/products/vitstats/), which contains current data on the total, male, and female population of each country, as well as data about the numbers of births, total deaths, and infant deaths. Although the printed and full PDF version is released only once per year, some of the online data tables are updated much more frequently.
Minor Sources
Office of Immigration Statistics (U.S. Department of Homeland Security)
Migration Policy Institute
Migration data for the United States is available from several sources. Official statistics for documented immigrants to the United States are available via the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Immigration Statistics (www.dhs.gov/data-statistics/). The Migration Policy Institute’s Immigration Data Hub (www.migrationinformation.org/data-hub/) is also a good source for basic statistics about immigration both around the world and in the United States.
Office of Population Research (Princeton University)
One of the best sources for microdata about immigration is the Office of Population Research at Princeton University (http://opr.princeton.edu), which disseminates data from several research projects that focus on immigration. These include the following:
Mexican Migration Project (MMP, http://mmp.opr.princeton.edu/home-en.aspx). Since 1982, this project has interviewed people in more than one hundred communities in Mexico about their experiences traveling to the United States or to other parts of Mexico to find work. The survey also gathers detailed demographic information on the households, as well as other general information. Additional interviews have been done with people from those communities who have settled permanently in the United States. Microdata from all of the surveys, now covering more than 20,000 households and nearly 140,000 people, is available.
Latin American Migration Project (LAMP, http://lamp.opr.princeton.edu). This project, which branched off from the MMP in 1998, uses similar methods to examine migration experiences in the rest of Latin America. Currently it has interviewed people from communities in Puerto Rico and ten countries in Central and South America and the Caribbean.
Immigrant Identity Project (IIP, http://opr.princeton.edu/archive/iip/). This data set contains transcribed interviews with 159 first- and second-generation immigrants living in New York City, Philadelphia, and New Jersey.
New Immigrant Survey (NIS, http://nis.princeton.edu). This survey asks legal immigrants to the United States about their experiences with work, education, health, child rearing, and other topics.
Princeton’s Office of Population Research also disseminates data from older (generally mid to late twentieth century) surveys and research projects related to fertility, including the World Fertility Survey, the European Fertility Project, and Chinese In-Depth Fertility Surveys. Registration is required to access many of these data sets.
Center for Demography of Health and Aging (University of Wisconsin–Madison)
The Center for Demography of Health and Aging (www.ssc.wisc.edu/cdha/projects.html), a project of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, makes available both the microdata and reports containing aggregate data from several of its studies. These include the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, which is following more than 10,000 people from their high school graduation in 1957 until their deaths, and three studies of health and medical care among the elderly in various countries: Health, Wellbeing and Aging in Latin America and the Caribbean, which covers seven Latin American countries; the Mexican Health and Aging Study; and the Puerto Rican Elderly Health Conditions study. Registration is required to access the microdata from many of these surveys.
Bureau of Labor Statistics (U.S. Department of Labor)
The BLS runs longitudinal surveys through its National Longitudinal Surveys program (www.bls.gov/nls/). Over the years four groups, beginning as teenagers or young adults, have been followed: a group of men from 1966 to 1981, a group of women from 1968 to 2003, a mixed-gender group since 1979, and another group since 1997. Additionally, two groups were followed beginning in middle age (a group of men from 1966 to 1990, and a group of women from 1967 to 2003), and in 1988 the study began following the children of the women from the 1979 mixed-gender group. Although the focus is on work experience, consistent with the BLS mission, the surveys also feature questions on education, health status, and personal finances, among other topics.
Panel Study of Income Dynamics (University of Michigan)
The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID, http://psidonline.isr.umich.edu) is another longitudinal study that has followed multiple generations of the same families. The PSID started with five thousand families in 1968 and is still following those families and their descendants today. Additionally, members of families that immigrated to the United States after 1968 were added to the panel in the 1990s. As the name suggests, a major focus of the survey is on family finances, such as employment and expenditures, but there are also questions on health, children, and education. Some of the variables are available only in restricted-use data files, but much of the data is freely available after registration.
Census Bureau (U.S. Department of Commerce)
The Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP, www.census.gov/sipp/index.html) is a household-level, longitudinal study managed by the Census Bureau. The focus of this survey is on the economic situation of households, and on how that situation is affected by benefits from various government programs and private not-for-profit organizations, including rent subsidies, free or reduced-price school lunches, and food from charitable organizations. Thus, the survey includes detailed questions about dozens of different potential sources of income, including income from employment, pensions, and child support payments as well as from programs ranging from Social Security to college scholarships. Individuals are also asked questions about their assets and expenditures. SIPP has been ongoing since 1984, but the same people have not been followed for the entire course of the survey; a new panel of households is added, and an old one is dropped, every few years.
Data Sharing for Demographic Research (Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research)
Data Sharing for Demographic Research (DSDR, www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ DSDR/) is a data archive within the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). It contains more than five hundred data sets, many of them freely available but some available only to ICPSR subscribers.
AsiaPop
AfriPop (www.clas.ufl.edu/users/atatem/index_files/AfriPop.htm) and AsiaPop (www.asiapop.org) provide fine-grained population density data—people per approximately 100 meters squared—for countries in Africa and Asia, respectively. This data is available as GeoTIFF image files, which can be viewed as is or imported into GIS software for further analysis.