Applying a Family Equalization Adjustment to Weighting for the Current Population Survey

• Activity Number: 614
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Thursday, August 5, 2010 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Survey Research Methods
• Author(s): Andrew Zbikowski*+
• Companies: U.S. Census Bureau
• Keywords: Surveys ; Estimation ; Weighting

Abstract

The Current Population Survey (CPS) produces demographic and economic estimates of people, householders and households. The householder is the person or one of the persons who owns or rents the unit occupied by the household. The estimated numbers of households and householders should agree by definition, but there has long been a discrepancy in these estimates. Other surveys at the Census Bureau now use a family equalization adjustment that reduces this discrepancy. This adjustment also produces consistent estimates of householders and partners for married and unmarried couple households. This paper discusses the application of this adjustment in the basic CPS. I examine estimates of household, householder and population characteristics with the current CPS weighting method and the family equalization method, including variances of the estimates from these methods.