Understanding Society User Support

Dear Alita,

my work is under way, I do have one question before I dive into it. You write above that a_natchild has birthyear info for all children ever born to respondent. Unfortuntately, and this might be an error on the website or not I only find the following variable that has birthyear for non-resident or out of household children:

fertilityhistory_w1.lchdoby
Year of birth of non-resident biological child
Universe
if ( LNPrnt > 1 | LPrnt = 1 ) (Parent of biological child) and if ( LChLv = 2,3 ) (Child non-resident or deceased)

As usual, I highly appreciate your help.

Best wishes.

Nico

Dear Alita,

please no hurry, I just want to write this because I want to have it out there. I am trying to find the birthyear of each child because I want to find out the number of children a immigrant women had before she came to the UK. For that purpose, I found for the IEMB f_lchborn (in f_natchild) which suits me very well. For the other subsamples, I need to compare the woman's year of arrival to the birthyear of the children (I guess I can leave the newborn out because they were born in the UK). Using a_natchild and f_natchild, I have an appended dataset with a_lchdobm, a_lchdoby and f_lchborn as raw data and as you suggested the created variables kbdate1 etc.. Here is my problem, as I understand it the pidp is the identification for the parent in w_natchild. If that is the case, I am not sure how to link/merge this file with my master dataset that contains all the information on the parents (indresp pidp and year of arrival to the UK). The problem is that the using dataset has the same pidp for each child which makes sense because a parent with three kids has three rows with the same pidp because it is the same parent. But how can I uniquely merge this using set with the master set? I hope I am making sense.

Thank you very much.

Nico

Dear Alita,

first of all, thank you very much for your helpful code. I ran it and it works. And I did append the w_parents files into one doing the following:

foreach w in a b c d e f g {
use pidp mnpid `w'_mbirthy using `w'_parents, clear

gen wave = strpos("abcdefg","`w'")
renpfix `w'_

save kids`w'wave, replace
}

use kidsawave, replace

foreach w in b c d e f g {
// append all seven waves of parental files
append using kids`w'wave
}

Now, looking at the parental files by waves or in the appended form, there is something goofy going on. When I sort by mnpid and wave, and look at the data I observe the following:
The year of birth is the same within mnpid, but the pidp of the kid varies. For instance, the mom has five rows, and each row got the same birthyear although the pidp varies. And this holds true for every individual mom. I take from this, assuming that pipd identifies the kid, and mnpid the mom, that the birthyear is the birthyear of the mom and NOT of the kid. In addition, when I look at the w_child file, which also contains information on the birth year of the kid(s), and run the same code replace w_indall with w_child, I obtain for the year of birth only missings. This might suggest that there is something wrong with the data.

Any comments are more than appreciated.

Thank you very much.

Nico

Hi Nico,

In the resulting files w_paernts there are 5 variables: pidp of the child (pidp), the mother and father pidp (mnpid fnpid) and the mother and father birthyear (w_mbrithy w_fbirthy). So for households where someone has more than one child, their birthyear will remain the same for each of the row representing each of their children with different pidp.

Best wishes,
Alita

Dear Alita,

this is what I thought, that I now have the birthyear of the parents. What I do need, if you are so kind and reread what I wrote previously, is the birthyear of the Children!
Where would I find that if at all?

Thanks Alita.

Nico

Hi Nico,

In the first step when you are extracting the child's pidp and their parents's pidp (mnpid, fnpid) from INDALL, you can also extract the w_birthy variable which will be the child's birth year.

For step 2, the birth year of the non-resident child associated with each adult is called a_lchdoby. Note in this file the pidp refers to the parents' pidp.

Best wishes,
Alita

Dear Alita,

thanks again for your kind reply. As to step 2, that is clear now, thanks a lot. With regard to the INDALL file, you claim that w_birthy is the child's birth year. This brings me back to my #6 post. It seems to me that there must be something wrong with the data file. I write this because when I look at the w_birthy in my dataset, I find the variable ranging from the early 20th century to the late 20th century. Note, these must be co-resident children's years of birth.
Sorry for being such a pain.
Please let me know what you think.

Best wishes,
Nico

Dear Alita,

you have been once again of tremendous help.

This is what I am looking for.

Thank you very much and sorry about the confusion.

Best wishes.

Nico