Understanding Society User Support

Hi,

Sorry to bother you again. I work for DWP and have been trying to do some cross sectional analysis of the wave 7 Child Maintenance datafile (“g_chmain”). As far as I can tell this dataset is at the child level with one row per relevant child (is that right??) but I wasn’t sure how to go about weighting these child-level observations if, for example, we wanted to produce a cross tab of the total number of children in separated families by the amount of time the children spend with non-resident parent (using g_cseeterm variable).

Each child-level record in the “chmain” dataset has a PIDP person identifier but this seems to relate to the parent of each child rather than the child themselves. There is a child-level person number variable called “g_childpno” in chmain so my plan was to use this to link each child’s record from chmain to their corresponding record in the “indall” table, assuming g_childpno in chmain corresponds to g_pno in the indall table - is this correct??. From the children’s records in the indall table I could get the g_psnenub_xw cross sectional person weight for the weighting and also the g_strata and g_psu variables to take stratification and clustering into account (and then use proc surveyfreq in SAS to produce the crosstabs). Does this seem like a reasonable approach and would these be the right variables to use?

Grateful for any advice you can offer.

Many thanks

David