I’m interested using CPS displaced worker supplement from 2012 to 2018 and was wondering if its possible to link some variables from the ASEC for these years. Thanks!
Each observation in the CPS microdata is an individual respondent to the CPS interview in a particular month. The structure of the CPS rotating panel is such that sampled households are interviewed for four consecutive months, experience an eight month break with no interviews, and are then interviewed monthly for an additional four consecutive months before exiting the CPS panel. Respondents are first asked a battery of labor force and demographic questions as part of the Basic Monthly Survey (BMS) each month and then may be asked additional questions if that month includes supplemental data collection. Eligible household members in January of each even-numbered year are asked a series of questions regarding displaced worker status as part of the Displaced Worker Supplement. Meanwhile, household members in March of each year are asked the Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC) questions. Therefore, in order to link variables across these two supplements, it is necessary to first link person records across these two interviews in the panel.
To do so, you will need to request a data extract that includes both supplements, the variables from each supplement that you are interested in, and the validated linking key CPSIDV. Your data extract will be in a long format, where persons will have one record for each month in which they were interviewed. For example, if you included selected January and March of 2022, persons interviewed in both supplements will have two records in the data file: one with their responses to the Displaced Worker Supplement and one with their responses to the ASEC supplement. To analyze variables from both supplements, you will likely want to reformat the data in a panel such that each observation includes responses from both supplements. This is relatively straightforward to do in Stata using the reshape, wide command. We provide additional sample code on this data workshop materials page. In R, this can be done using the pivot_wider function in the tidyr package.
Due to the structure of the CPS rotating panel, about 50% of respondents interviewed in January are eligible to be interviewed and included in the following March ASEC. You can visualize this using the IPUMS-CPS Rotation Pattern Explorer (RoPES) tool. In the screenshot below, I’ve used the tool to display the months in which respondents to the 2012 Displaced Worker Supplement are eligible to be interviewed. Note that in addition to the 50% of respondents in the following (2012) ASEC, up to 25% of those eligible for the 2012 Displaced Worker Supplement were interviewed in the preceding year’s (2011) ASEC and that up to 25% will be interviewed in the next year’s (2013) ASEC. Therefore, if you want to include all possible links between the two supplements, you will need to request ASEC samples from 2011-2019 together with the 2012-2018 Displaced Worker Supplement samples.
Thank you. This is very helpful.
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