CREATING STATISTICALLY LITERATE GLOBAL CITIZENS: THE USE OF INTEGRATED CENSUS MICRODATA IN TEACHING

Census microdata are the individual responses to census questionnaires recorded in computerized form as numeric or alphabetic codes. The data include demographic characteristics such as age, sex, marital status, relationship to head of household, migration, education, and occupation among other individual-level variables. They also include information on household characteristics such as urban/rural living, home ownership, and access to utilities like electricity and water supply, and number of rooms in the household. Over the past half century most of the major statistical agencies have prepared census microdata files for analysis by staff and, in many cases, by external researchers. With ever-expanding access to computers, analysis of large census microdata files is now possible for ordinary researchers, and even students, as this article will later demonstrate. The idea of gaining access to census microdata from around the world and across time is exciting for researchers, but it is also daunting. The first challenge is gaining access to the data from the country of interest. In the past decade, a policy 2