I am trying to get data on the proportion of families within a country that have 3 generations (grandparents, parents, children) or more living within the same household. I would like to get this for all the countries for which there are recent data for (between 2000-2010), but have been struggling to find this variable. Any help would be much appreciated!
This is likely going to be a bit tricky. The detailed codes of the RELATE variable does include a “grandparent” code (==4500), but this code is not available in all IPUMS International samples.
Another possible way to identify the 3rd generation within households is to use the IPUMS defined family interrelationship variables MOMLOC, POPLOC, and NCHILD. With these variables you could identify people who are living with BOTH a parent and an own child. Using this method if MOMLOC/POPLOC identifies an individual as a parent and if the same individual has a non-zero value for MOMLOC/POPLOC, then this person lives within a household with three generations. You should be able to perform this method by creating dummy variables for those with NCHILD > 0 AND MOMLOC > 0 OR POPLOC > 0. If a household contains one of these people, then the household contains three generations.
I hope this helps.