ACS Data Users Group

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?

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.