Colombia: 1964, 1973, 1985, 1993
France: 1962, 1968, 1975, 1982, 1990
Kenya: 1989, 1999
Mexico: 1960, 1970, 1990, 2000
United States: 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990
Vietnam: 1989, 1999

All households.

SERIAL is an identifying number unique to each household in a given sample. All person records are assigned the same serial number as the household record that they follow. (Person records also have their own unique identifiers -- see PERNUM.) A combination of YEAR, COUNTRY, DATANUM, and SERIAL provides a unique identifier for every household in the IPUMS-International database; YEAR, COUNTRY, DATANUM, SERIAL, and PERNUM uniquely identify every person in the database. SERIAL can be used to identify dwellings in Colombia 1993, Vietnam 1989, and Mexico 1970- 2000. In these samples, the first 7 digits of SERIAL provide the dwelling number common to all households that were sampled from the same structure. The last three digits give the sequence of the household within the dwelling. SERIAL was constructed for IPUMS-International, and has no relation to the serial number in the original datasets.

This variable is comparable across all samples.

Approximately half of all households were sampled together in dwellings. In the other half of the cases dwellings cannot be identified (the last 3 digits of SERIAL are "000").