I’m conducting an analysis of earnings by major and as such, am pooling one-year micro data files from 2010 - 2017. Am I able to use the person weights associated with each one-year file to weight the total pooled data set or should I be creating custom weights based on population estimates from another source?
Additionally, will the sub-setting of the data (removing those who don’t report major or work a certain number of hours per week) affect the weighting methodology I need to use?
Thanks!
Based on what you’ve described here, it sounds like you will need to adjust the provided sampling weights. Specifically, the sampling weights allow for representative population estimates for the given survey year. So, if you pool together several single-year ACS files and apply the sampling weights, you’ll calculate population size estimates that are many times larger than the actual population. An approximate adjustment is to simply divide the sampling weight by the number of samples you are pooling together. So, in your case, generate a new weight equal to PERWT/8. The sub-setting of the data that you suggest should not dramatically influence this weighting methodology.