Hi,
I want to identify individuals with occupation “early childhood teaching assistants”, in CPS data starting 2003. Upon studying the occupation codes I find that this occupation code exists pre-2003 (code=467), however starting 2003, this occupation category ceases to exist and instead, a more general occupation category of “teaching assistants” (code=2540; 2545) was introduced starting 2003. My question is, is there any other way (direct or indirect) to identify individuals with occupation early childhood teaching assistants in the CPS data, 2003 onwards?
Thanks!
The CPS uses the Census occupation classification scheme to report occupations; IPUMS offers these via the OCC variable without modification or recoding (we offer the harmonized variables OCC1990 and OCC2010 to facilitate comparability across time). See the codes tab of the OCC variable for links to the codes used in each group of samples. The Census occupation codes are updated approximately every 10 years. The 1992-2002 CPS data use the 1990 Census Occupation Classification codes, and the 2003-2010 CPS data use the 2000/2002 Census Occupation Classification codes.
To address your specific question about “early childhood teaching assistants”, I looked through the Census’ webpage on occupation code changes and found a crosswalk between then 1990 and 2000 Census Occupation Classification systems. I added a screenshot below that shows how those assigned as 467: Early childhood teacher’s assistants in 1990 would be assigned under the 2000 scheme (19% coded as 254: Teacher assistants and 81% as 460: Child Care workers). The code 4600: Child care workers is still used through the latest occupation coding scheme introduced to CPS in 2020 (changing to 4600 in 2011) and the code 254 : Teachers assistants changed to 2540 in 2003 and again to 2545: Teaching Assistants in 2020 (the crosswalk for the 2018 occupation codes that are used in the 2020-forward CPS notes that this is a change in the code and label only, all cases that would have been assigned to 2540 were still assigned to 2545).
There are a number of ways that you might infer which records are early childhood teaching assistants across this change in occupation codes. First, you could compare occupation with industry (note that IND codes also change across time, so you will need to use the harmonized variable IND1990 or apply different criteria for each sample); the IND code 8470 corresponds to child day care services in 2003-2008, 2009-2013, 2014-2019, and 2020-forward).
Best,
Dan Backman
IPUMS Team
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