Household weights for IPUMS international-which type of weight in Stata, and application to subgroup.

INTERNATIONAL
1

I’m using IPUMS international, specifically for South Africa and Brazil. I’m doing household level analysis so using wthh. My questions are- which type of weight should I be using in Stata (it can not be frequency weight, because the weights are not integers). aweight? pweight?

The second question-do I still use weights in the same way when dealing with subgroups- for example, I am looking at households headed by blacks only in South Africa for some of my analysis. Does it make sense to apply the weights when calculating statistics for only this subgroup?

Thank you.

2

In Stata you would use pweights to weight the data. You would apply these weights even when working with a specific subgroup since each person’s weight inflates that person to their representative size in the entire population. So, if an individual has a weight of 100, that individual represents 100 people in the total population. Even if you are not including the entire population in your analysis, to account for all 100 people that the single respondent represents you would need to apply the weight variable.

I hope this helps.