Can you tell me to calculate income as a percentage of the federal poverty level (FPL) using IPUMS ACS data?
The IPUMS USA variable POVERTY expresses family income as a percentage of federal poverty thresholds. It was created using income and family structure information to calculate the family income as a percentage of the appropriate poverty threshold that is based on family size and number of children under 18 years of age. You can read more on this on the poverty definition page.
Looking at POVERY in Stata, the values run between 0 and 86. But the desciption says it should be a 3 digit value? There’s clustering at 0, 11, and 51. What’s going on there? Is 51 actually the 501 percent referred to in the code section?
POVERTY is a 3-digit variable with codes between 0 and 501; because it is a numeric variable, the leading zeros do not show up in the data. According to the codes tab for POVERTY, 000 denotes N/A (not applicable), 001 is a bottom code for all values of 1 or less, and 501 is a top code for all values of 501 or more; I would expect to see larger frequencies for these codes. I checked the frequencies of the codes for POVERTY in Stata for multiple ACS 1-year samples and they look as expected. Can you share more information about the analysis you are running to get your results such as which samples you are looking at and if you are restricting your analysis to a specific subpopulation?