How to identify same sex couples

[Maximilian]

Dear Michelle,

First, thank you for your responses and for being so helpful! You have already helped me a lot.

I have to ask a few additional questions, just to ensure that I have a correct dependent variable and don’t publish something wrong. My questions relate to your answers from either this threat here or this threat here:

Are that many married homosexual men not living together? - American Community Survey

Dear IPUMS team, I am using a sample from the American Community Survey (ACS) as provided over IPUMS. I am specifically interested in analyzing the wage gap of male homosexual couples. To do so I created a variable (this variable is called VAR_CH going forward) to indicate if an individual is cohabitating with a same sex partner. I created this variable after the following logic: Var_CH: Two individuals are homosexual and cohabitating if they are linked by the SPLOC variable and share the sam…

You wrote:

“Because SSMC is a household level variable, keep in mind that you will want to remove other members of the household that are not spouses.”

The spouse would always be the spouse to the head of household right? So I would want to keep the spouses AND the head of household, right? In other words if the household is a Same Sex Married Couple- Household the Spouse as well as the head of the household are both together in a same sex marriage?

You write that to identify same sex couples I should use this code:

“keep if pernum == 1
keep if sex == sex_sp
keep if related_sp == 0201 | related == 1114”

I have the same issue as with the first question: Why wouldn’t I also keep the head of household in? (related shows the relationship to the head of household thus if one person in the house hold is a spouse, that automatically makes the head of household part of a couple as well). If you do “keep if related_sp == 0201 | related_sp == 1114” (I assume you meant to write related _sp ==1114) you loose all the heads of household because their related_sp==0101.

So overall, I would think I should do it like this:

*First I recode the RELATED variable in a way that the combination of their values for couples is unique.

recode related (101 = 1) (201=5)(1114 = 10), g(r)

recode related_sp (101 = 1) (201=5)(1114 = 10), g(r_sp)

*Now I combine them. This new variable has two unique values: 6 (Head of household and spouse) 11(Head of household and unmarried partner)

rr = r + r_sp

*A person is now part of a same sex couple if there is a relationship were one is head of household and the other one is related to the head of household by being his/her spouse or unmarried partner and both have the same gender.

gen ssc = 0

replace ssc = 1 if sex= sex_sp & rr <=11

Now the same sex couple variable (ssc) includes the head of household and the spouse/partner.

Now when I construct my SSC variable like this and recode SSMC so that only head of household and their spouses have the value one then all SSMC=1 are also SSC =1 which is nice. It seems to all fit finally …thanks also to your help =).

In summery it appears to me that I have solved the issue, but to make sure that I m not overseeing something here my questions in short:

1. For both variable SSMC and SSC; Should the head of house hold also be coded as ==1 as they are part of the partnership?

Thank you again for all your help and please let me know if I am overseeing something here.

Best regards,

Maximilian