Question 1

What is the population of interest in the Current Population Survey (CPS) ? Be precise – are there any age criteria, occupation criteria, and/or geographic criteria ?

The survey includes a sample of 60,000 homes, focusing on individuals who are 16 years and older to make inferential assumption about the U.S. population as a whole. All of the counties and independent cities in the country first are grouped into approximately 2,000 geographic areas (sampling units). The Census Bureau then designs and selects a sample of about 800 of these geographic areas to represent each state and the District of Columbia.

Question 2

What is the sample used to estimate the population parameters/headline statistics like unemployment rate, employment to population ratio ? Be precise - how many households and/or people are included ? Is there anything interesting/unique about the survey methodology that you found ?

Question 3

Do you think CPS is a representative sample of the US entire population after reading about its methodology or your online research?

Yes, because the geographic scope of the survey is designed specifically to represent the entire country. The respondents are also not asked specifically about their state of employment, nor given an opportunity to decide their own labor force status. Their status will be determined based on how they respond to a specific set of questions about their recent activities. This lessens the opportunity for collecting inaccurate information.

Question 4

CPS data can be accessed from a few places. One easy way is to create an account at IPUMS CPS to download the data. Go to IPUMS CPS and create an extract containing the variables INCWAGE (Wage and salary income) and LABFORCE (Labor force status) from January 2019 onwards.

Question 5

Import the data into RLinks to an external site.. Getting data from the IPUMS website section for screenshotLinks to an external site..
You will need to install and load the ipums package (it helps make importing IPUMS data into R easyLinks to an external site.) - install.packages(‘ipumsr’) and library(ipumsr) Then, download the data extract and the ddiLinks to an external site. file in the same working directory. See Grace Cooper, IPUMS staff’s response here on how to save the ddi file in the working directoryLinks to an external site. (right click -> save save -> … )

Question 6

Plot / summarize income wage variable by labor force status. You can revise your data extract easily as you decide what variables to add/discard/keep. Do you find any patterns in labor force statistics that make sense, such as income varying by labor force status?