Number of families: income less than $25,000, at least 1 kid under 6, parents present working?

1

Hi -

I am trying to answer a fairly specific data question. I’ve gotten close, I think, but not exactly to the answer. I’m curious if anyone can help me. I’m using the 2009-2011 3 year ACS sample.

What I’m looking to answer is this: In Louisiana, what is the number of families with annual income of less than $25,000 (so $0-$24,999) who have at least 1 child under the age of 6 and the parents are in the labor force (1 parent if single parent household, 2 parents if married couple household)?

I think that I’ve narrowed down the number of families with at least 1 child under the age of 6 and income of less than $25,000, but I have not been able to sort out if there is a way to work in the employment or labor force status of the parents.

Here is how I have set it up so far:

Row:yngch(0-5)

Weight: perwt

Filter: statefip(22)

Filter: ftotinc(-28866-24999)

Any suggestion on how to add the labor force status of parents by family type? Is this possible?

2

Unfortunately, I don’t think it is possible to perform this analysis in the online data analysis tool. Instead, you’d have to use a statistical software package such as SAS, Stata, or SPSS.

I think the easiest way to create your employment variable is going to be using our attach characteristics feature. You can use this option to add EMPSTAT_MOM and EMPSTAT_DAD to each child record. Within your stats package you can create a variable equal to 1 if and only if all identified parents are employed.

In your specification, not that you are performing a person-level analysis, counting the number of persons that fall under these filters. Your next step would be to turn this into a family-level analysis. You could first drop all records with AGE>5, and then create a unique family identifier out of SERIAL and FAMUNIT. Create a variable that allows you to select just one record per SERIAL-FAMUNIT (here is one example), and then perform your analysis while looking at only these records. In this way, you will essentially create a data set that has one record per family that has at least one child under six.