Integrated Current Population Survey Data for Population Dynamics and Health Research

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Project Summary/Abstract The parent grant for this administrative supplement request aims to expand and improve IPUMS CPS, an essential data resource for research on population health and child well-being in the United States. IPUMS CPS streamlines access and reduces technical barriers to analyzing data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), the nation's most comprehensive source of data on the economic and social well-being of US individuals and families, including women of reproductive age and children. IPUMS CPS enables rigorous and reproducible research on population dynamics and the social and economic contexts in which health inequities are created and reinforced, enabling public policy based on sound scientific evidence. The parent project’s goal is to ensure broad access, timely delivery, and innovative use of CPS data for population dynamics and population health research. This administrative supplement request represents a third set of improvements related to decreasing data processing times to reduce the time to deliver new data to the research community and reduce the costs of maintaining the infrastructure over the long run. The supplement request has three specific aims: (1) Automate the testing process in response to code changes; (2) Shift integration testing earlier in the workflow; (3) Enhance difference reporting. These enhancements will be a massive time saver for IPUMS data production, but the research community is the true benefactor in the form of access to higher quality data more quickly. Sophisticated testing requires close collaboration between data content experts and software engineers. The administrative supplement request proposes a new collaboration between a research programmer analyst and software engineers to develop a more robust and reliable suite of data production tests and better integration testing that occurs earlier in the data harmonization process. The tests will improve the data production process, resulting in more effective testing for quality assurance and more rapid delivery of data, for both IPUMS CPS and each of the 13 IPUMS data collections built on the shared IPUMS Platform.