Does IPUMS provide any guidance on locating a family ‘head’ within each FAMUNIT? I understand that within households, there are several ways of locating the ‘householder’ (e.g., RELATE, PERNUM, etc.) However, within either the array of Census family variables (FTYPE, FAMKIND, etc.) or in the IPUMS-provided FAMUNIT variable, I do not see a straightforward way of locating an equivalent family ‘head’. There may be no intuitive way of doing this sociologically (i.e., more clear who is a householder than who plays some kind dominant role within a family); however, I see from this discussion that the SPM has some method of designating an SPM ‘head’, though this variable has not be imported into IPUMS.
Any thoughts on how one might identify a primary family member or ‘head’ would be useful. Thank you!
I am not aware of official guidance from the Census Bureau or from IPUMS on how to identify the head of a family unit in the CPS. The SPM head variable (SPM_HEAD in the original CPS codebook) may be useful to you. While IPUMS does not provide the variable, you can merge the original data from the Census Bureau/BLS onto IPUMS CPS data files to take advantage of the variable while still using harmonized CPS data from IPUMS. I have not found any documentation from the Census Bureau that describes how the variable is created or how the head is identified. You could certainly reach out to the Census Bureau to ask how the determination is made.
The Census Bureau defines a householder as follows:
the person (or one of the people) in whose name the housing unit is owned or rented (maintained) or, if there is no such person, any adult member, excluding roomers, boarders, or paid employees. If the house is owned or rented jointly by a married couple, the householder may be either the husband or the wife. The person designated as the householder is the “reference person” to whom the relationship of all other household members, if any, is recorded.
This may or may not correspond with your definition or understanding of the head of a household or a householder. Householders are identified in IPUMS CPS data in RELATE. In households with multiple families, a householder is still identified in RELATE. In multi-family households, there are additionally household members who may be part of related subfamilies of the first family in the household, and/or household members who are part of unrelated subfamilies. Each subfamily within the household has their own reference person. The variable FAMREL reports the relationship between each individual and the reference person of the family unit they are part of. These family units are defined by the Census Bureau (note that IPUMS defines family units differently; see FAMUNIT for more information). You may want to start by looking into how often SPM_HEAD and FAMREL are the same person.
How you define the “dominant” family member is up to you; depending on how you define the head of the family, the CPS may or may not provide adequate information for you to identify that person. The CPS provides demographic and employment information that can allow you to define a head of a family based on income, employment status, age, relationship status, and so on, but does not allow you to observe subjective family dynamics like decision-making power or “roles” within a family.