CLASS DATA SET FROM THE 1850 CENSUS

 

            This dataset is a probability sample of free persons listed in the 1850 federal decennial census. I created it from the public use samples made available by IPUMS at the University of Minnesota.

To Get Your Copy to Analyze from my Webpage

  1. You need to be on a computer having web access, SPSS and a USB mobile drive.Go to http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~shammas/cshammas/   From the index on that page pick full1850.por, right click on it and save it under the same name in your USB drive.
  2. Go into SPSS click on FILE, open, data, pull up the usb drive directory and click on the full1850.por file. It will open in the data editor.
  3. You will notice that there are two views in the data editor --- a data view which shows the data matrix and the variables view which describes the variables and their coding. Toggle between the two by clicking on the two tabs in the bottom left-hand corner of your screen.
  4. Before you end your session be sure to save the file on your mobile drive as a regular SPSS datafile rather than a portable file. Do this by using SAVE AS full1850.sav. 

Univariate Analysis

  1. Choose ANALYZE in the SPSS data editor, then descriptive statistics and then frequencies. You want to get frequencies for all your variables and in addition statistics (mean, median, mode, standard deviation, standard error) for all interval variables.
  2. After you go through the process of choosing the variables and the results show up on an output screen, you can cut anything you don’t want just as in word processing and then print it out in the lab. You also may want to save it as an output file. Choose FILE and SAVE on your usb drive. In order to read the output file and your datafile you have to be in SPSS. You use the FILE, open procedure and then choose either data or output depending on what you want to look at. If you want to edit the output file outside of SPSS you need to save it as a text file.
  3. Bring the output to the next class meeting. 

To Find Out More About the Dataset

    Go to http://www.ipums.umn.edu on the Web, which is the homepage for the ipums data archive and choose USERS GUIDE and then IPUM VARIABLE QUICK REFERENCE.