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!
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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.
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Hello! I have a follow-up question to this thread.
I am trying to identify who in the household responded to the survey. That is, who picked up the phone and gave responses for the household to the Census Bureau?
I am considering using RELATE (would this person be RELATE==101, by definition?), though it seems like RELATE is not constructed such that the “head/householder” is the person who responded. Rather, it seems RELATE has an economic definition regarding who is paying for the place of residence. I am also considering using PERNUM (would this person be PERNUM==1, by definition?), since this is the list of all people in the household, and theoretically the individual completing the interview would be listed first. However, I haven’t found any documentation supporting this view.
Could you provide more guidance on best practices for determining who the “respondent” to the survey is? I see on the BLS site, that it can be any adult in the household (who is at least age 15) who is knowledgeable about the household. Is it possible to identify which individual this is using the fields provided in CPS or CPS-IPUMS?
The variable HHRESPLN reports the line number (LINENO) of the household respondent. From the HHRESPLN description:
The household respondent is the person who responds to the CPS survey for the household. The household respondent and the reference person are not necessarily the same. One person may provide all of the CPS data for the entire sample unit, provided that the person is a household member 15 years of age or older who is knowledgeable about the household. Information collected from the household respondent for other members of the household is referred to as proxy response (CPS TP66 5-1).
The reference person is identified by RELATE and is referred to as the head of the household or, more recently, as the householder. The householder is identified when first creating the household roster. To create the household roster, the interviewer asks the household respondent to give “the names of all persons living or staying” in the housing unit, and to “start with the name of the person or one of the persons who owns or rents” the unit. The person whose name the interviewer enters on line 1 (presumably one of the individuals who owns or rents the unit) becomes the reference person (CPS TP66 5-1).
Normally the head of the household is listed on the first line, followed by the spouse, their children, members of subfamilies (in the same order), and unrelated persons.
Note the following:
- The Census Bureau line number variable, LINENO, does not correspond to the IPUMS-created line number variable PERNUM.
- HHRESPLN often changes from month to month, since different people in the household can respond to the CPS for their household in different months.
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