Hi there, I am wondering what weight I can apply to estimate the housing vacancy rate with IPUMS data. I am not sure if applying household eight (hhwt) or person wight (pwt) is appropriate since there is no household or person occupying those vacant units.
Since VACANCY is a household-level variable that will not contain people, PERWT is not appropriate; the appropriate weight to estimate representative statistics is HHWT. Also note, in order to include vacant households in your data you will need to create a hierarchical or ‘household records only’ data extract. You might also find the US Census American Housing Survey (AHS), which contains information about Housing Vacancies and Homeownership to be a useful resource for your analysis.