An Assessment of Age Reporting in the IPUMS-I Microdata

Johanna Fajardo-Gonzalez, University of Minnesota
Laura Attanasio, University of Minnesota
Jasmine Trang Ha, University of Minnesota

This paper provides data users with a global assessment of the age reporting in the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series-International (IPUMS-I) data. We investigate the consistency of the demographic data from 23 countries in Africa and Asia using various statistical procedures to identify systematic irregularities in the reporting of ages. In our analysis, we consider both single and multiple censuses, when available, to obtain age-ratios, sex-ratios, and other summary measures such as the United Nations Age-Sex Accuracy Index, the Whipple's index, and the Myer's blended index. Our results indicate that overall there are some anomalies in the reported age data from these countries over time. In most cases, the reported age statistics show a strong preference for terminal digits 0 and 5. In similar analyses stratified by sex, we found that in some samples, this preference is stronger among females than among males.