IPUMS USA: descr: CITYERR

IPUMS USA

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CITYERR

Coverage error in CITY variable

Description

CITYERR identifies the level of mismatch error between each CITY code and the corresponding city.

CITY's code assignment protocol yields errors of omission (where a CITY code is not assigned to some residents of the corresponding city) and errors of commission (where a CITY code is assigned to some non-residents of the city). As an index of mismatch for each CITY code, IPUMS uses the sum of percent omission error (the portion of a city's population residing in excluded PUMAs) and percent commission error (the portion of the population in associated PUMAs that did not reside in the city).

For each reported CITY code in 1990 and later samples, CITYERR identifies the level of the sum of errors.

To ensure that CITY codes are generally representative of city populations, cities are identified only where the sum of match errors is less than 10%. Researchers may use CITYERR to impose a more restrictive error limit if desired.

In multi-year ACS/PRCS samples that span different PUMA definitions, this variable is based on whichever PUMA definition is associated with the respondent's survey year (as given by MULTYEAR). This occurs only in the 2022 5-year samples and in multi-year samples that include both 2011 and 2012 survey years. For more information about how PUMA definitions vary within multi-year samples, see the PUMA variable description.

For more detailed information about PUMA-city relationships and CITY match errors, IPUMS provides these tables (in Excel spreadsheets) summarizing relationships between PUMAs and "large" places, defined here as places with populations exceeding 75,000:

2022 and later ACS and PRCS samples: