I’m looking to analysis monthly hours worked by wage/income. I was thinking of using IPUMS CPS for hours worked and ORG for a wage/earnings variable (creating a few bins for income/wage groups). My question is, which weight should be used? My guess is, would the weight used by WTFINL since I am analyzing hours worked and only using earnings for categorizing the observations. Does this sound viable?
Analyses of ORG variables should use EARNWT. Because earner study participants are a smaller group than those in the BMS, using WTFINL would underestimate weighted population counts. If you are using ORG and BMS variables together (e.g., tabulating mean hours worked (BMS variable UHRSWORKT) by earnings (ORG variable EARNWEEK2)), applying EARNWT restricts your results to earner study participants and appropriately adjusts your estimates to be representative of this target population.
Thank you for your response. When writing my code I used the an approach that was the same as you have suggested (it made sense once I actually started to code), but left my question up in case I was misunderstanding.
Again, thanks for taking the time to respond.