User's Guide Page 18
1850 Public Use Microdata Sample User's Guide and Technical Documentation
Family Interrelationships . The 1850 Public Use Microdata Sample is simultaneously a sample of households and of individuals . This hierarchical structure is one of the greatest strengths of the census file .
By combining the characteristics of several individuals within a household,
researchers can create a broad range of new variables about family and household composition and the characteristics of family members .
For example, we can analyze fertility by attaching children
to their mothers, and we can address the family economy by simultaneously measuring the age, sex, and occupation of all family members. One of our goals has been to develop a consistent, versatile, and reliable set of tools to make it easy for researchers to construct family variables using standard statistical packages . The 1850 sample includes a variable on the imputed relationship of each household member to the head of household.
This variable (IMPREL) provides the basic measure of family
relationships, but it is not sufficient to identify all family relationships and it is often inconvenient as a tool for constructing new family variables.
Consider the following household:
Table 3. Example of Fancily Relationships
Relationship
Surname
Age
Sex
Marital Status
MULCAHY
HEAD
61
F
MULCAHY
DAUGHTER
32
F
S
RYDEN
SON-IN-LAW
32
M
M
RYDEN
DAUGHTER
27
F
M
RYDEN
GNDCHILD
HACKER HACKER
-
W
4
M
S
BOARDER
26
M
M
BOARDER
22
F
M
The relationship variable is sufficient to establish that the two daughters are both children of the household head, but to identify the other family interrelationships we must look to their other characteristics .
We can infer that the son-in-law is married to the second daughter rather
than the first one because they share the same surname and are both listed as married; for analogous reasons, we know that the grandchild is probably the child of the second daughter listed .
It is also safe to assume that the two boarders are married to one another, because they are
both married, they share the same surname, they are both adults and close to the same age, and they are listed adjacently . To allow users to identify relationships among spouses, parents, and children without forcing them to use multiple variables and complicated logic, the 1850 census file includes a set of pointers called SPLOC, MOMLOC, and POPLOC . These pointers identify the location within the household of each individual's own spouse, mother, and father, respectively . these variables .
Table 4 illustrates
PERNUM is the sequence number of each individual within the' household .
SPLOC shows the sequence number of each individual's own spouse ; for example, since the sonin-law is married to the second daughter who is in the fourth position, his SPLOC is 04 .
Persons