Understanding Society User Support

Hi Alita,

Not really unfortunately, maybe I'm not understanding something - I'm only talking about the racel_dv variable: when I look at it in the indresp files I see that there are usually quite a lot of missing values. For instance, in wave J, there are 567 missing values. I was just wondering why this was.

Albert

I see.

racel_dv is combined from the information on racel (or racelt*) collected from across all the waves, i.e., the information is picked up from whichever wave it was reported. The first time someone completes an adult questionnaire they are asked this question (ff_everint~=1 & ff_ivlolw~=1). However, there are two groups that get left out - (i) rising 16s, i.e., those who completed a youth questionnaire prior to the first adult interview (N=143) (ii) whose first adult interview is a proxy interview (N=283), (iii) continuing BHPS sample members who hadn't reported racel (N=97) (iv) those who refused or didn't know (N=28). That leaves 16 for whom this information is missing due to other reasons.

We also provide another variable, j_ethn_dv, which imputes missing racel information using these sources (i) yprace (ethnic group question answered during the youth interview) (ii) ethnic group of parents (iii) ethnic group answered as part of the enumeration grid in Waves 1 & 6. An accompanying variable ethn_dv_source explains what is the source of this information.

There is a trade off between racel_dv and ethn_dv. The latter has fewer missing values but includes ethnic group information that is not self-reported.

Best wishes,
Alita

Ah I see: thanks for your answer, that's incredibly helpful! I wasn't aware of ethn_dv. I think I'm looking for most completeness in my data, so I think I'll choose to use that, but I understand the trade-off.

Thanks again,
Albert