I’d like to know whether teenage mothers are living on their own with their child/children (and potentially with her partner or husband) OR whether these mothers are living with their parents. If she’s living with her parents, what is the household income level and what is the family structure (are her parents married, or is she living with a single parent, mom or dad?).
I’ve not used the household/subfamily composition variables before and am wondering if you could give me some guidance as to whether this kind of query is possible using IPUMS USA - ACS.
This analysis is certainly possible to run using IPUMS USA. To clarify terms, households include everyone who is living in a certain housing unit and therefore there can be multiple families, groups of related people, within a household. Subfamilies are simply families that live in someone else’s household. This page describes in greater detail family interrelationship variables in IPUMS USA.
If you are looking to run your analysis on the family rather than the household level, you should start by creating an extract and adding the variables AGE, SEX, NCHILD (number of own children residing with the individual), SPLOC (their spouse’s person number if they are in the same household), MOMLOC (mother’s person number), POPLOC (father’s person number), MARST (marital status), FAMUNIT (which family in the household the individual belongs to), and FTOTINC (total family income). SPLOC, MOMLOC, and POPLOC may be especially helpful since if any of them are greater than 0 then the individual is living with that family member. I would highly recommend reviewing the Codes, Description, and Comparability tabs for each variable you add. You may find a lot of use in the select cases and attach characteristics tools that are available after creating your data extract from the data cart. You can use the select cases feature to limit your extract to only teenage mothers living with their children using the variables AGE, SEX, and NCHILD. Attach characteristics allows you to attach a variable such as MARST to the individual’s relations, such as their parents.
This video tutorial can be very helpful if you get stuck using the various tools in the IPUMS extract system.