I need to extract parents’ income and children’s income separately, and find how will parents’ income influence children’s. But I can only find household income which sums all family member’s income. Does anyone know how to do this?
I assume you are referring to IPUMS USA; please correct me if that is not the case.
IPUMS USA provides data from the American Community Survey and U.S. decennial census, harmonized across time. The ACS and U.S. census both include a number of questions on personal income. You can view a list of all person-level variables in IPUMS USA that relate to income in the data extract system by hovering over the PERSON dropdown menu and selecting INCOME variables.
The variable INCTOT reports each respondent’s total pre-tax personal income or losses from all sources for the previous year. From the availability section of the variable, you can see that the variable is available in IPUMS USA samples from 1950-onward. See the codes section of the variable for important information on variable codes; for income variables, which are continuous, the codes section provides information on special, non-dollar codes, such as N/A codes or top codes.
You can use person-level income variables along with family interrelationship variables to compare the income of parents and their children. The IPUMS-constructed pointer variables MOMLOC and POPLOC report the PERNUM of each respondent’s mother and father, respectively, within their household. Households are uniquely identified within each sample with the SERIAL variable. Note that it will only be possible to compare the income of parents and their children if the parent(s) live in the same household as their child(ren). It is not possible to determine who the parent of a child is unless the parent lives in the same household, and vice versa. This is because respondents are not asked directly about the income of their parents or the income of their children.