Households with cash public assistance

USA
1

I want to replicate the Census estimates for households receiving cash public assistance (DP03_0072). I believe I need to use household weights and examine only the household head, but I can’t tell if this will include the welfare related income of anyone in the household, or whether it only goes to the household head. E.g, in a situation where a young single mother family receives TANF, but is staying with an older relative householder, would this be included if I filtered the data by PERNUM=1?

Thank you.

2

Cash assistance received is captured in the IPUMS person-level variable INCWELFR. Each household member has a distinct value for this variable. If you want to calculate the total value of cash assistance payments for the household, you’ll first need to sum this value for all household members. Then you can do your calculations using HHWT and restricting to PERNUM=1 as you described.