Hi Everyone—

We had a really nice training session a little over a week ago to learn about using the University of Minnesota IPUMS.  This system provides a user-friendly way for you to run tabulations, regressions using the Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS) from the decennial Censuses, and the American Community Survey.

The training provided an excellent start to filtering (limited the sample based on values of different variable), recoding values, and creating new variables.  You can do a lot without having a statistical software  package on your own computer. 

Of course, the PUMS have very limited geography, but the benefit is that you can use many different variables in your table definition.  You are not limited to the tables pre-defined by the Census Bureau. 

I had only a limited number of slots for the April 16 session, but Gary Thomas at TTI recorded the session for us: here is the link.

http://fhwa.na3.acrobat.com/p25106595/

Elaine Murakami

FHWA Office of Planning

206-220-4460