I am a new user, and I am hoping to use the CPS to find monthly estimates of the total number of households in the U.S. I have a few questions I was hoping someone might be able to help me with as I seem to be a bit stuck:
1.) Is the variable OWNERSHP an appropriate variable to use?
2.) Which weight do I use in PROC FREQ?
3.) How do I go about creating a time series (i.e., estimates by month for each year…I was hoping to go back for about as many years as possible)?
4.) Do I use a BY statement for this?
5.) Any suggestions on code would be greatly appreciated (what I have tried is below).
proc freq;
tables OWNERSHP;
weight HWTFINL;
by YEAR MONTH;
run;
Thank you!
I am not a SAS user, so the amount of code support that I can provide is very limited. However, based on my review of the syntax in the IPUMS training exercises for SAS (see exercise one and exercise two) and your stated goal, I can share a few recommendations.
The variable OWNERSHP identifies whether a given housing unit is occupied by someone who owns/has a mortgage on this property or is being rented by its occupants. Since it is only available in a single sample each year (the Annual Social and Economic Supplement, or ASEC, fielded in March), you will not be able to use it to obtain monthly estimates of the total number of households. Instead, you should request an extract with basic monthly samples (non-ASEC) and include a person-level variable available in each month such as SEX.
HWTFINL is the correct weight to use for household-level aggregate estimates.
You should include the line where pernum in (1); in your proc freq statement. PERNUM sequentially numbers person records within the household. In order to produce household-level estimates for data where each row is an individual person, you will want to restrict your analysis to one person per household. The easiest way to do this is to include observations with PERNUM = 1.
Note that a household refers to all the people (related and unrelated) who occupy a housing unit (such as a house or apartment) and that a count of the number of households is really a count of the number of occupied housing units (although the CPS excludes institutional group quarters such as correctional institutions). You can find a quarterly count of the total number of occupied housing units in the US from FRED.