Hi! New to IPUMs and would love some help. I am trying to figure out the median family income of families with kids under 6. How do I go about doing that?
There are a number of ways to do this, using either IPUMS USA or IPUMS CPS.
In IPUMS USA, you can use the variable FTOTINC to identify family income and NCHLT5 to identify individuals (and families) with children under the age of 5. Note that identifying families with children under the age of 6 will require a more involved process using AGE, MOMLOC, and POPLOC to essentially recreate NCHLT5 to identify the number of children under 6 years old. In general using the US Census and ACS data available in IPUMS USA might be preferable in your case because it includes a larger sample of individuals.
In IPUMS CPS, you can use the variable FAMINC to identify family income and NCHLT5 to identify individuals (and families) with children under the age of 5. Again, identifying families with children under the age of 6 will require the same more involved process noted above. If you are looking to include information on labor force activities in this analysis, then the CPS data available in IPUMS CPS might be preferable.
In either IPUMS project, you can download the microdata and use your preferred statistical software to estimate the median family income for families with young kids or you can use the online analysis tool in IPUMS USA or IPUMS CPS.
After a brief discussion about this topic, I learned of another way to identify households (note that households are slightly different than families, since multiple families can live in one household) with children under 6 years old. You can use the variable YNGCH, which gives the age of the youngest own child in the household.