CISER

This page was developed to serve as an alternative to the Census Bureau’s FTP Site for the 2010 SF1 Urban-Rural Update files.

Enhancements

We’ve made some enhancements to the Census 2010 SF1 files available from this page.

We combined all 49 segments (including the geo header) for each state into one file and made it available in four (4) ready-to-use formats –SAS, SPSS, Stata, and CSV (with headers and quoted strings).  We also provided setup files for the CSV files in SAS, SPSS, Stata, and R.  Each file contains all records (tables/variables) for each individual state and also for all 50 states combined.

In addition, we’ve retained and enhanced the 49 segment files that users download from the CB’s FTP site for those who do not have the capacity to process big datasets.  Each segment is comma-delimited, and now has headers, with string values enclosed in quotes so they can be properly read in as string, and we made its extension name .csv so it can be imported readily into a statistical software or spreadsheet.  You can download the individual segments for each state from downloads in the CSV49 tab.

Access

There is no fee for this service, you may download files for free. Just click on your desired download(s), enter the recaptcha text to validate you are human (not machine), and then agree to the CISER Data Use Agreement.

An alternative site that we highly recommend is nhgis.org. They have an amazing tool for extracting selected SF1 tables/variables. And their service is free as well. NHGIS has a very close relationship with CISER through our director Bill Block.

Technical Notes

• All files were created in SAS and then exported to SPSS, STATA, and CSV using Stat/Transfer
• Stata Users:  To open the Stata dataset you need to have Stata/SE or STATA/MP  and start by setting maxvar to a number much higher than 9,060 variables (e.g., set maxvar 11000)
• The four (4) setup files below are applicable to the CSV files under the CSV tab (not CSV49).
  • SAS Setup File
  • SPSS Setup File
  • STATA Setup File
  • R Setup file
• You are downloading zipped files.  Some of these files can be considered big data when unzipped.
• To guide you in your analysis, read the following:
  1. Census 2010 SF1 Technical Documentation
  2. Data Field Descriptors (the Codebook in Excel)
• For questions, clarifications, corrections, comments, and suggestions, please e-mail Florio Arguillas at foa2@cornell.edu.