ACS Data Users Group

This isn't precisely an ACS question but does anyone have experience with the Supplemental Poverty Measure ? The SPM is an "experimental" alternative to Poverty Level. Has anyone used PUMS data to construct it (is this even possible)?

Dave Dorer

Yes, there are some working papers by Census Bureau staff and others on using the ACS to construct SPM estimates:

https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/working-papers/2015/demo/SEHSD-WP2015-09.pdf

https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/working-papers/2020/demo/SEHSD-WP2020-09.pdf

And the Census Bureau has some research files for people to create SPM estimates using the public use ACS microdata:

ACS Supplemental Poverty Measures (SPM) Research Files: 2009 to 2019

Dear Mark,

Fantastic ! I've been doing a literature review on SPM for the last 2 or 3 days. I have looked at many papers on the Census website (starting with the main SPM page) but I didn't see one that explicitly used ACS PUMS data.

Thanks again,

Dave