Hi all, This feels like a straight-forward question but I'd like to confirm. I'm currently using the person-level ACS 1-year file for 2018. I work in R. Anyway, we're interested in developing some population estimates for Opportunity Youth, which are identified as 1. simultaneously unemployed and not in school, and 2. between the ages of 16-24. I did the following:
1. Used ESR (employment status recode) is either 3 or 6 to identify individuals that were unemployed / not working.
2. Used SCH to identify individuals that aren't enrolled in school.
3. Used AGEP to identify individuals that fit within that 16-24 years of age category. I used the intersection of these three characteristics to create a flag that characterizes a given respondent (is that equivalent to each row in a file?) as an opportunity youth, or as not an opportunity youth.
That said, if I wanted to know how many children opportunity youth have, would I just tabulate the NOC variable? Or is there something about relationships between rows / responses that I need to be concerned with? This feels really straight forward to me, but perhaps this might not be the right approach. I'm understanding this as, if we identify Row 1 as an opportunity youth, and look at the NOC variable and it says 3, then that means that that Opportunity Youth has three children either by birth, marriage (step-children), or adoption.
Like, even without identifying opportunity youth, if I was interested in knowing the number of children a person has, would I just tabulate NOC?
NOC would tell you the number of children in the household, not necessarily those that belong to the opportunity youth. There is a question about fertility that women aged 15 - 50 answer about whether…
NOC would tell you the number of children in the household, not necessarily those that belong to the opportunity youth. There is a question about fertility that women aged 15 - 50 answer about whether they gave birth in the last year. Aside from that, you'd have to look across the household and use the relationship codes to deduce whether the child belongs to the opportunity youth. For example, an opportunity youth may live in a household with his or her parents and 2 other siblings. The NOC for this household would be (probably) 3 and those 2 other children would not belong to him/her. However, in a household with 1 householder, 1 child (opportunity youth), and 1 grandchild, the NOC would be 2 but the number of children that belong to the opportunity youth should be 1.
tl;dr: You need to look across the household to define a variable that counts the children that belong to the opportunity youth.
Also, does this imply that if you identify the householder (RELP == 'reference person'), and filter your data for only householders and then tabulate NOC, then NOC would be accurate for the householder? But otherwise, you still have to tease out the other relationships?