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NUMPERHH
Number of persons in household
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Description

NUMPERHH reports how many persons lived within the household. This number is sometimes larger than NUMPREC (the number of person records following the household record in the IPUMS), because the census PUMS from 1850 to 1930 did not sample large households (i.e., households containing more than 30 persons) in their entirety. Instead, individuals (SAMPRULE=4) or related groups (SAMPRULE=3) were sampled from these large households; in these cases, NUMPERHH will show how big the entire household was. See SAMPRULE and "Sample Designs" for a discussion of differences in how the samples were drawn.

User note: Because of data entry errors in a small number of large and complex households, NUMPERHH was occasionally entered as less than NUMPREC--a logical impossibility. Correcting these data would be prohibitively difficult, and NUMPERHH has been coded as missing (9999) for these cases. However, visual inspection of these households suggests that DWSIZE is a reasonable approximation of true NUMPERHH values where stated NUMPERHH values are illogical.

Additionally, there are a small number of household records not sampled from within a larger household where NUMPERHH is larger than NUMPREC; these are likely due to data entry errors.