ACS: Working age adults in family and household

I’m using ACS 2006-2015. I’m currently using the family size variable, but want to create a variable of of how many adults of working age are in the family. Likewise, I want to create a variables of how many adults of working age are in the household.

The actual mechanics of how you can accomplish this will vary depending on the statistical package you are using. However, if, for example, you are using Stata, a variable that counts the number working adults per household could be created with the following syntax:

egen var=total(age>=15 & age<=64), by(serial)

Similarly, you could do this for the number of working adults per family using FAMUNIT and SERIAL as your “by” variables.

In doing this, there are some things you might want to consider. How are you defining your working population? How would you like to treat the different types of housing units? I would suggest looking at the variable GQ.