What are microdata?
Microdata are composed of individual records containing information collected on persons and households. The unit of observation is the individual. The responses of each person to the different survey questions are recorded in separate variables. Microdata stand in contrast to more familiar “summary” or “aggregate” data. Aggregate data are compiled statistics, such as a table of marital status by sex for some locality. There are no such tabular or summary statistics in the IHIS data. Microdata are flexible. One need not depend on published statistics from a survey that compiled the data in a certain way, if at all. Users can generate their own statistics from the data in any manner desired, including performing individual-level multivariate analyses. See an image of IHIS data here. In this example, the data are presented in hierarchical format, which means that a household record is followed by individual records for each person in that household. If users chose the default option of r
