Hello - Is parent highest education available for 1991, 1994, 1995?
Basic sociodemographic data such as education (e.g, EDUCREC1, HIGRADE1) is available in the NHIS for all persons in the household through 2018. In households where a child resided with their parent, users can identify their parent’s record using the IPUMS-defined family interrelationship variables MOMLOC and POPLOC. You can then obtain the parents’ education from their records.
Our attach characteristics tool helps simplify this process by attaching the characteristics of a person’s coresident parent as a new variable on that person’s record . To access the tool, you will need to add variables of interest to your data cart. You can then click to view your data cart to find the tool on the Extract Request page (see screenshot below). The new variable will have the suffix _pop/_mom to denote that it’s the respondent’s mother’s/father’s value and the prefix corresponding to the variable that it’s reporting (e.g., higrade1*, for higrade1_mom).
While you only asked about 1991-1995 data, I want to note that beginning in 2019 the NHIS no longer releases core sociodemographic measures for all persons in a household (see our user note on the 2019 redesign), so the attach characteristics feature is not available for 2019-forward IPUMS NHIS data.
Thanks so much for this helpful information.