Hi, I want to see the stability of answers on disibility questions from one year to the next. I see how to download data, but how do you get just the data that is linked? So there exists short panel data right? Just 1 year apart? how do I get it?
Thanks so much.
The monthly CPS is a rotating panel design, which means households are interviewed for four consecutive months, are not in the sample for the next eight months, and then are interviewed for four more consecutive months. Thus, up to 50% of the households in the IPUMS extract you create are from the previous year, although this percentage can be considerably less. There is no overlap for periods longer than one year.
Since the disability variables are part of the CPS basic file, you will want to use the NBER resources here that provide STATA .do files for matching across March CPS files. You can adjust these programs to match across non-March months as well. Not all of the identifiers required to link basic surveys are currently available in the IPUMS-CPS data. As a result, you will need to merge your IPUMS data extract with the raw NBER files. Since IPUMS and NBER files share a common sort order, you can perform a sequential merge in your stats package to merge the NBER identifiers onto the IPUMS files, by year. That is, match the first NBER record to the first IPUMS record, the second to the second, etc for each sample. This will effectively add the NBER identifiers onto the IPUMS records. You can then use the NBER identifiers as described in the linked resources above.
Note that the NBER STATA programs can also be adjusted to perform matches between non-basic files as well (i.e. supplement data). If you wish to link your data to non-basic CPS data, you can find the required identifiers here.
Hope this helps.
Yes, thanks soo much Tim