2015 Data Matching Issue

Hey Everyone,

I am continuing a research project that was originally started in 2017 and looked at 2015 ACS data.  It is looking at wage gaps in Travis County TX.  I am having an issue replicating the data that was originally collected.  I am following the procedures that the original researchers used and I get very similar (for the most part) yet different results.  I get these different results when looking at men's and women's income by race/ethnicity, by education level and in different occupational categories.  I'll give a quick example.  When lkooking at table B20017 and filtering for "White Only" in Travis County, Texas, I select Topics INcome and poverty and select Income and earnings and filter by individual-level earnings as was done in the original data collection.  The researchers originally came up with 50,967 for male and 42,033 for female and when I pull the data now, I get 51,886 for male and 43,338 for female.  This is only one example, but every race/ethnic category I use, each level of education and each occupational category has the same issue.  I can't make the 2015 data I collect now match the 2015 data that was collected previously from the same ACS survey.  Any thoughts on why this might be?  

Parents
  • I'd bet one set of numbers come from the 2015 5-year estimates and the other come from the 2015 1-year estimates. (Unfortunately, I find it's very common for research to cite a single year even when using 5-year estimates. The original data you're trying to replicate therefore may be from the 2011-2015 5-year estimates even if they're referred to as "2015".)

  • I thought that might be an issue as well, but when I go in to pull the data, I don't even get an option for anything other than the 5 year estimates.  I have the option until I select a race/ethnicity variable then it reverts to only the 5 year estimate.  I also thought it might have something to do with the "income and earnings" filter because when I select that option for individual earnings, it doesn't actually change any of the output in the table, everything stays the same.

Reply
  • I thought that might be an issue as well, but when I go in to pull the data, I don't even get an option for anything other than the 5 year estimates.  I have the option until I select a race/ethnicity variable then it reverts to only the 5 year estimate.  I also thought it might have something to do with the "income and earnings" filter because when I select that option for individual earnings, it doesn't actually change any of the output in the table, everything stays the same.

Children
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