Food Security Supplement questions

CPS
1

I think I must be doing something wrong–I selected every year of the Food Security Supplement, but I only see one variable (the weight variable). Are they somewhere else?

2

Once you’ve selected the food security supplement samples (typically the December monthly sample), you should see all of the food security questions under the “Food Security Supplement” heading under the “Household” variables tab. It sounds like you are looking under the “Person” variables tab. Since the food security supplement questions ask about a household’s food security, rather than individual food security, these variables are located under the household variables.

3

Hi Jeff, thanks for this; I just started a new job at Feeding America and the CPS is really going to come in handy. What I’m not seeing in the list of variables is one for the 160 replicate weight variables that I would need to calculate standard errors for estimates. Do you happen to know which variable that is?

4

IPUMS CPS does not currently offer the replicate weights for supplements other than the ASEC. You can find the replicate weights on the Census Bureau website. The NBER site also has these weights for 2010-2017 in various file formats. You can link these to IPUMS data but you’ll need to do it in two steps.

  1. First link the weights to the raw public-use data file. The public use files along with codes to load the data are available at the NBER website. In order to link the weights to the CPS data, you can use the variable QSTNUM which is a unique household identifier.

  2. Once you’ve linked the weights to the raw CPS public use data files, you can link these to your IPUMS CPS extract using the instructions on this blog post.

5

Thank you, Matthew!

6

Hi Matthew,

Thanks so much for this helpful information. I’m in the process of linking the raw CPS data with the replicate weights found on NBER, but I’m running into issues loading the raw CPS data (“.dat” extension) into R. Do you have any advice on how to do this? Thanks in advance.

7

Hi Katherine,

You can follow the instructions on the Introduction to ipumsr page. You’ll need to install the ipumsr package and download the DDI codebook provided with your extract to a working directory. Set your working directory with setwd() as the folder with both your datafile and the codebook. Your last step will be to grab the R code in the command files tab of your extract and run it to input the data into R. Please follow up if you are still experiencing any difficulty with the data.