Hello,
I am looking for help on how to calculate the number of young children (ages 04) with incomes at or below 185% of FPL using CPS data (either online tool or microdata) in R studio.
I noticed that CPS has the variables SPWIC and GOTWIC variables, but I am leaning more towards using the SPWIC variable due to the data flag on GOTWIC. I was thinking of doing something like this for someone that got WIC:
mutate(wic_recipiency = ifelse(SPMWIC => 1, “Yes”, “No”))
I can either filter for young children or simply include the AGE variable within this mutate function to only account for young children but I am more concerned about the right WIC variable to use for my analysis.
Additionally, since I am looking to create a federal poverty level threshold of “at or below 185%”, the POVERTY variable does not allow for that since its highest threshold is “150 percent and above the low-income level”.
Is there a way I can work around this poverty level issue?
Any guidance is appreciated.
Thank you for your time.
The flag variable for GOTWIC (QGOTWIC) provides additional information by identifying respondents whose value for GOTWIC was allocated by Census Bureau enumerators due to missing or contradictory data. The presence of a flag variable does not imply that there are widespread or systematic quality issues with a variable. From a quick cross tabulation, I’m finding that about 7% of respondents to the 2023 ASEC were allocated a value for GOTWIC, with the vast majority being assigned a value of 1 (“no”).
More broadly, GOTWIC and SPMWIC measure different things. GOTWIC identifies pregnant women and mothers who received WIC benefits (all boys/men receive a code of GOTWIC = 0), regardless of whether they themselves qualified or their child under 5 years of age did. While you might find a few stray cases in each sample year of children with GOTWIC = 2 (yes), these appear to be coding errors by enumerators misattributing the mother’s WIC benefits to her children. SPMWIC meanwhile assigns the total value of WIC benefits received by members of an SPM family unit to all members of that family (see SPMFAMUNIT for more information on how supplemental poverty measure family units are defined). Since SPMWIC assigns positive values to the young children of mothers who earn WIC benefits, it makes sense to use SPMWIC in your analysis of children.
It is possible to calculate income-to-poverty ratios for families individually in order to identify those at or above 185% of the federal poverty threshold. OFFTOTVAL reports the total family income and OFFCUTOFF provides the poverty line threshold. Dividing the former by the latter should allow you to identify the percentage of the family’s income relative to the threshold. This method is specifically for generating official poverty estimates rather than the supplemental poverty measure (SPMPOV). You can find more information on how IPUMS CPS worked with the Census Bureau to offer these variables for reproducing official poverty estimates in the Official Poverty Rates Using IPUMS CPS Guide.