I’m trying to make a table of summary statistics to compare to respondents of a survey I ran. In my data I have information on one adult in the household. I’d like to use the 2022 ACS 5 year sample to make a comparative table of demographics to illustrate who took my survey versus the underlying population.
I’d like to restrict the ACS data to people with school age children, which I think I can do using the age of eldest and youngest children. My confusion/sticking point is: should I be using the household weights versus person weights? Additionally, should I only look at the head of household (pernum ==1)?
Whether to use household weights or person weights depends on the level of the statistic that you’re estimating. Household-level statistics (e.g., the percent of households with school age children) are those that describe households. For these, you should use household weights and restrict your analysis to a single person per household so that you count each household only once (typically done by restricting your sample to respondents with PERNUM = 1). The household weight appropriate for most household-level analyses of IPUMS USA data is HHWT.
You should be aware that the ACS does not ask participants to identify a household head. Rather, the first individual that participants list in their household roster is assigned PERNUM = 1. The only restriction is that this person must be someone under whose name the housing unit is owned or rented.
Person-level statistics (e.g., the average household income of persons with school age children) are those that describe people. For these, you should use person weights and include all people who satisfy your sampling criteria (i.e., if you only sampled persons aged 18+ you should restrict to respondents in the ACS who satisfy this criteria). The person weight appropriate for most person-level analyses of IPUMS data is PERWT.
Regarding YNGCH (age of youngest child) and ELDCH (age of oldest child), note that this identifies persons with children (biological, step-, or adopted) whose usual residence is the same household. These family interrelationship variables will not report the age of children who do not reside in the household.