Support #2282
open
Complexity of family life
80%
Description
Hello,
I am particularly interested in looking at how the complexity of family life is changing. Specifically, I want to generate variables that help me understand: how many adults have dependent children who don’t live with them? and how many children in couples have a parent who isn’t their biological parent? What I'm after doesn't need to be exactly these variables but something quite similar e.g. on the USoc family and households topic page there's a stat " One in four children under 15 no longer live with both biological parents" that gets at something similar, so something like this and also living with non-biological parents would be ideal.
I have seen a few responses to posts that ask similar question with respondents directed to the egoalt and xhhrel files, as well as the sample code for egoalt. I'm struggling a bit to get exactly what I want by combining the egoalt matrix information with the individual USoc file. Given that the stat above is published on the topic webpage I'd really appreciate it if some Stata code could be shared to produce something that does something equivalent to what I'm after.
Thank you very much in advance
Updated by Understanding Society User Support Team 29 days ago
- Category set to Data management
- Status changed from New to Feedback
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Dear Charlie,
Thank you for your question.
“How many adults have dependent children who don’t live with them?”
The closest you can get to answer this question is by using lvrel3 (Main survey variable: lvrel3 Son(s)/daughter(s) – Understanding Society):
https://www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/documentation/mainstage/dataset-documentation/variable/lvrel3
and ohch16 (Main survey variable: ohch16 Children under 16 not living in HH – Understanding Society):
https://www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/documentation/mainstage/dataset-documentation/variable/ohch16
These questions were asked in waves 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13. Starting in wave 14 these questions are split into different categories of children:
biological lvreladp11 (Main survey variable: lvreladp11 Biological Son(s)/daughter(s) – Understanding Society):
https://www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/documentation/mainstage/dataset-documentation/variable/lvreladp11
adopted lvreladp12 (Main survey variable: lvreladp12 Adopted Son(s)/daughter(s) – Understanding Society):
https://www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/documentation/mainstage/dataset-documentation/variable/lvreladp12
step lvreladp13 (Main survey variable: lvreladp13 Step Son(s)/daughter(s) – Understanding Society):
https://www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/documentation/mainstage/dataset-documentation/variable/lvreladp13
(and similarly for the age questions, e.g. biou16num1 – Number Biological children under 16 not living in HH – Understanding Society):
https://www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/documentation/mainstage/dataset-documentation/variable/biou16num1
“How many children in couples have a parent who isn’t their biological parent?”
For this you can use the identifiers we provide: pidp numbers of natural parents, n_pn1pid and n_pn2pid, and pidp of nat/adopt/step parents, n_pns1pid and n_pns2pid. You can find them both in indresp and indall.
The code below will identify children for whom at least one parent is not biological:
use n_indall, clear
count if (n_pn1pid==-8 & n_pns1pid!=-8) | (n_pn2pid==-8 & n_pns2pid!=-8)
I hope it helps.
Best wishes,
Piotr Marzec
UKHLS User Support
Updated by Charlie McCurdy 21 days ago
Dear Piotr,
Thank you very much for your help, that's much appreciated. I had a follow up to this. I've been using the egoalt datafiles so that I can get a longer series by stitching together BHPS/ USoc rel and rel_dv variables (relationships of alter to ego). Doing so means I can do something similar to the above e.g. looking at the % of children in families with at least one step parent and the % of children living with single parents only. When I do this there seems to be some data quirk between BHPS and USoc when it comes to the % of children living non-bio families - it looks like there's a switch from living with non-bio families in BHPS to living with single parents only. Grateful for any thoughts on this.
I can see that in rel_dv variable guide there is a note: "Recode of the edited relationship variable to resemble the code frame that existed on the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). No attempt has been made to correct for differences in the data collection which means the information is not directly comparable across studies." Does this essentially mean the two aren't comparable? Would be grateful for a detailed description of what might be going on here for the relationship groupings I am interested in (step families and single parents).
Thank you very much in advance,
Charlie
Updated by Understanding Society User Support Team 18 days ago
Hi Charlie,
It’d be great if you could provide a bit more detail: the exact definition of these groups, which waves, whether the data is weighted, and so on. A table summarising your results and the Stata code would also be useful.
Thanks,
Piotr
UKHLS User Support