I need to calculate household size by nativity. Calculating the household size for the total population is straightforward. For this, I divided the total population in households by the total number of households. I used HHTYPE with PERWT to get the population in households and RELATE = 1 with HHWT to get the number of households.
I am having trouble with getting the population living in foreign-born households (I have the total number of foreign-born households) as a foreign-born head of household can have native-born members. Therefore, a crosstab by nativity will only produce households with only native-born OR only foreign-born members. To get the household size for foreign-born households I would need to divide the total population in households (irrespective of nativity) by the total number of foreign-born (or native-born) households. However, all combinations I have tried give me only the foreign-born population in foreign-born households.
What combinations of variables do I need to all persons in foreign-born or native-born households?
SAS or SPSS syntax would also be helpful.
Thanks!
Typically with these sorts of questions, researchers define “foreign-born households” as households headed by a foreign-born individual; this may seem like an overly-simplistic but will make the analysis tractable. Additionally, you may want to consider the NUMPERHH variable, which reports how many persons lived within the household.
Thank you.
I still run into the same problem. If I create a variable of foreign-born households (RELATE = 1 AND CITIZEN GE 2) then I only get the foreign-born members in the household, not all members who any most cases are also native-born. I know that the total number of persons in foreign-born and native-born households is split evenly. In NYC, for example each should have about 4 million.
NUMPERHH is probably the variable I need, but has not been used since 1940. Is there an equivalent or a way to link all members of the household to the fb head of house regardless of nativity?
You could also look into using NUMPREC, which reports the number of person records that are included in a sampled unit. If you narrowed down your data to heads of households that were foreign born, you could then sum the number of persons per household.