IPUMS in the classroom experience from Brazil Bernardo L. Queiroz Cedeplar-UFMG-Brasil

Introduction IPUMS user since 2002 – while a graduate student at Berkeley Ph.D dissertation using Brazilian Census from IPUMS Few papers using IPUMS data with Cassio Turra (NTA), Laeticia Souza (labor force participation), André Golgher (human capital and labor market), Natália Alves (retirement) and others– a couple I need to add to IPUMS bibliography More recently, using IPUMS to help teach classes (statistics, data analysis, labor economcis) Also, encouraging students (undergrad and grad) to do international comparisons using IPUMS data

Experience in Classroom Once a year I teach 2 courses on statistical software and databases for 1 st year grad students (in Demography) and senior year undergrads (Actuarial Sciences) Idea of the course is to give them a first look on the main softwares available (R, Stata and SAS) and show microdata available to write M.A thesis, Ph.D dissertation and senior thesis I also teach a Labor Economics class: Sometimes I use IPUMS data to estimate basic labor markert indicators (labor force participation, occupation, unemployment)

Experience in Classroom Lessons learned on using IPUMS in class: Show students how a census questionnaries looks like, what type of questions are asked on census; More important, they have an idea on how questionnaries evolve over time and how they differ cross countries From that, two tasks are performed:  1) divided class in groups, have them creating their own questionnaries and interview other students in the University;  2) pick one country (with more than 1 year available) and write a report on changes observed, what could be related to the changes, interesting questions that are not asked, etc.

Experience in Classroom Basic data analysis using IPUMS data: Calculate labor market indicators, such as labor force participation rates, unemployment rate, mean wages, income inequality, hours worked; Calculate basic demographic indicators (when data is available): mortality, fertility, migration and population age structure Grad students are encourage to write their term papers using IPUMS data (since all term papers require some sort of data analysis)

Experience in Classroom Lessons learned: User-friedly web-based mechanism to extract data is very helpful:  Some students are still “afraid” to work with microdata, in fact, most of undergrads don't know what microdata are. Using IPUMS, they tell me, makes them see data differently;  Basic Stata, SPSS and SAS syntaxes that are prepared with data extract are used to help them to learn how to write their own syntax. Some students get encourage to do cross-country comparisons and historical analysis ( )

Results from Class Experience First, get students more prepared to work with microdata; Get used to write their own syntaxes and understand census questionnaries; I had a few students that first saw IPUMS in one of the classes I teach and later on used IPUMS data on their thesis and dissertations: Natália Alves: studied and compared the labor force of older workers in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile and Mexico. She is also doing a more complete analysis on the chilean retirement system, part of data comes from IPUMS; Laeticia Souza: in her Ph.D dissertation analyzed the relation between fertility and labor force participation in Brazil. One of the papers uses brazilian census data from 1970 to 2000 (presented at the 2008 Alap meeting) Cintia Simões: used IPUMS data to obtain population (by age and sex) for small and comparable areas.

Advantages of using IPUMS Web-site is extremely user-friendly; Generating a data extract is fast (and you don't need to use your own computer to read original data cd or tape); Integrated variables makes one's life easier (and process faster); also, having unharmonized variables available is very useful for more specific questions.

Concluding Use IPUMS for a long time and plan to keep using it; Recent experience show that more and more students are starting to use; Positive response from classes very encouraging (even if few students keep on to use IPUMS, it was very important to the learning process); For those that do no use Statistical Software, it is also possible to do a lot of analysis using Excel spreadsheet (less complicated analysis and a bit more work to get data ready, but possible and also fun)

Thank you IPUMS “Use it for GOOD -- never for EVIL”