Understanding Society User Support

Good afternoon,

By my reading, Understanding Society doesn't have a variable (derived or otherwise) on the number of dependents an individual has, whether inside or outside their own household - is this correct? Such a variable would capture:
- Biological children, adopted children and step children
- Who are ALSO dependents (eg aged under 16, claiming child benefit for, etc)
- ... Regardless of whether they live in the same household or not

The closest derived variable I've found for tis seems to be ndepchl_dv, which records the number of "own" children "in household." According to the Main Survey User Guide (p. 28), "own" dependent children is interpreted broadly biological, adopted or step; but this still restricts only to children in the household.

UKHLS has a wealth of other variables but none of them quite give the thing I'm looking for: eg:
- rach16_dv captures whether responsible for a child under 16, but is a binary variable and doesn't capture the number (and responsibility isn't the same thing as having a dependent);
- nchild only captures biological children (inside or outside of household), and not whether they're dependents;
- ncild_dv has the same issue re dependents, although this seems to capture non-biological children too;
- Ditto with lnaadopt re dependency

Based on the above, I believe ndepchl_dv is the closest to the variable I'm looking for. I'm assuming it may be possible to derive my own variable using information on the ages of other children, but this wouldn't necessarily equate to a dependent.

Any light you could shed on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in anticipation.

Best wishes,

Tom