How can one determine the total number of households within a jurisdiction that have at least one member who is 55 years old or older? I can filter for age(55-*) but if I am also filtering for pernum(1) to avoid double counting households how can I capture a household whose 2nd or 3rd member is 55+ but the pernum 1 is younger than 55?
I am assuming you are using the online analysis tool (SDA); please correct me if I am wrong. To my knowledge, this type of computation is not possible in SDA, though it is possible if you download an extract and run your analysis in a statistical package or Excel. In order to identify all households with individuals over the age of 55, including those that are not the household head, you will need to iterate over all cases with the same value of SERIAL (a unique household identifier) to create a flag for anyone 55 or older. Resources on how to use IPUMS data using various statistical packages are available here. An alternative option would be to utilize NHGIS summary tables. For instance, by filtering YEAR on “2018” and TOPIC on “Age” and “Households”, you will find the summary table “Households by Presence of People 60 Years and Over by Household Type”.
Got it… yes I was using SDA (too bad that tool is not up to the task!). Appreciate learning about the two alternatives.