Hi community,
Fairly new to this side of data gathering, and was pointed in this direction to gather the data I wanted.
I’m doing a study relating to the demographics of unionship in Washington, but seem to be a bit overwhelmed in even knowing where to start. If anyone is able to help, I understand it is a shot in the dark but it would be appreciated. Thanks.
IPUMS USA provides data from the U.S. decennial census and American Community Survey. Neither of these data sources include any questions about union membership. IPUMS CPS provides data from the Current Population Survey, which has included a question about union membership since 1983. The variable UNION in IPUMS CPS reports whether, for the current job, the respondent was: 1) a member of a labor union or employee association similar to a union; 2) not a union member but covered by a union or employee association contract; or 3) neither a union member nor covered by a union contract. You can use this variable, along with demographic variables, ethnicity and nativity variables, and the STATEFIP variable, to analyze the demographic characteristics of union members in Washington state.
To get started with IPUMS CPS, I would recommend watching our brief video tutorial on how to use the data extract system. We also have data training exercises that you may find useful in learning how to navigate the website and work with the data.
The CPS is a short, interrupted panel survey. Sampled households are interviewed monthly for four months. Then, they are not interviewed for a period of eight months. Finally, they are interviewed again monthly for four months. Some CPS questions are only asked of respondents as part of a particular supplement or in a particular month. The UNION variable is part of the outgoing rotation group, also called the Earner Study. The Earner Study is a set of detailed questions about work and earnings, which are asked of CPS respondents in their fourth or eighth month of surveys. You can read more about the CPS rotation pattern here.
When working with sample data, such as CPS data, you need to apply sampling weights to your analysis. Since UNION is only available for a subset of CPS respondents, you’ll need to use a different weight when analyzing this variable from the weight you would use if you were analyzing variables that are available for all CPS respondents. When analyzing variables from the Earner Study, including UNION, you should use the weight EARNWT. You can read more about weights and their importance here.
I assume you are inquiring about labor unions; if, however, you are asking about marital unions you could certainly use the IPUMS USA or the IPUMS CPS data. The video tutorial I shared is still relevant for requesting a custom data file via IPUMS USA or IPUMS CPS, you would just select different variables if you are interested in marital unions.
Thank you so much! This was very helpful.
Hi again,
I currently do not have a program to open the data and found that I can find the statistics online, here. My row was “Race”, and my column was “Union”. I want to be able to find the data on different races such as black, white, Asian, etc. in the State of Washington. Is there anyway you can help with this?
Sorry, I do not have much experience with these programs.
Carter Carlson
Government Affairs Coordinator
1621 114th Ave. SE, Suite 116
Bellevue, WA 98004
O: 425.588.3851 | C: 360.688.8640
Here is an example of how I might analyze union membership by race in Washington state using data from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC) of the CPS using the IPUMS CPS online data analysis tool.
I input UNION as the row variable and RACE as the column variable. I filtered by state to include only Washington state, which has a STATEFIPS code of 53. I also filtered by year to only include 2022. The online data analysis tool currently only offers the option to analyze all ASEC samples together, so this filter is necessary if you want to view data from a specific year or years. Finally, I filtered by UNION to only include people who are in the universe of the UNION variable. The universe of UNION in the 2022 ASEC is “Civilians 15+ currently employed as wage/salary workers and were asked the “earner study” questions. Excludes self-employed persons.” The codes section of UNION shows that the code zero indicates the individual is not in universe for UNION, and I chose to exclude those individuals from the analysis since we don’t have information on their union membership.
I also included the unweighted sample size, which is helpful for identifying cells where the sample size is very small. It can be difficult or impossible to draw any meaningful conclusions from analyses of very small sample sizes.
The resulting table shows, by race, the percentage of wage/salary workers (excluding self-employed workers) age 15+ who fell into each of the following categories in 2022: no union coverage, member of a labor union, or covered by union but not a member.
This table shows that in 2022, 72 percent of white workers, 38.3 percent of Black workers, 69.8 percent of American Indian/Alaska Native workers, 81.5 percent of Asian workers, and 82.4 percent of Hawaiian/Pacific Islander workers had no union coverage. If I were to scroll to the right on the table, I would see results for more race categories (such as multiracial categories). Note that the sample sizes here are very small. The largest cell size is 107. The smallest cell size is 1. These estimates are based on a very small number of survey respondents in each category, which means the standard errors around these estimates will be very large.
For help getting started with the online data analysis tool, I would recommend reading the short instructions page and/or watching this video tutorial.
