Hi David, If you have other measures which also predict income (or are predicted by income) you could set this up as a latent variable model, and save the factor scores.
Jeremy 2009/11/19 David Judkins <[email protected]>: > It oftentimes happens in research into matters of social equity that there > is a desire to estimate timeseries of mean access to social goods (such as > higher education or health insurance) by quantiles of the income or asset > distribution. Are the poor catching up the rich, are the rich getting > richer, or are the gaps stable over time? > > > > However, it is rare for questionnaires to ask for exact values of income or > assets. There are exceptions such as the SIPP or the March supplement to > the CPS, but most surveys will not have that level of income/asset detail. > So for sample persons in the bins containing the quantiles, it will be > unknown whether the person belongs the lower or upper quantile involving the > bin. > > > > One particular example is educational attainment of young people by > household income quartiles. The CPS education data are part of the October > supplement to the CPS and it has only rough categories for income. If there > were a good way of imputing continuous income, then quantile membership > would follow, and producing the data points of the timeseries would be > easy. One could also think about imputing quantile membership directly or > some maximum likelihood solution to the problem, but imputation of > continuous income seems easiest. Of course, one would want to repeat the > imputation process (probably a large number of times) to reduce the > variance. > > > > Anyone ever see such a thing or know of any other way of producing > income-quantile dependent means of variables of interest? (It was hard for > me to even come up with the right language for the datapoints in these > timeseries. If others have heard of other names for them, please let me > know.) > > > > Tom Mortenson of the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher > Education has been producing time series of this nature for a number of > years with a rather ingenious type of linear interpolation to the graph of > mean educational outcomes by income bin, but I’d like something with less of > an ad hoc feeling to it. > > > > David Judkins > Senior Statistician > Westat > 1650 Research Boulevard > Rockville, MD 20850 > (301) 315-5970 > [email protected] > > -- Jeremy Miles Psychology Research Methods Wiki: www.researchmethodsinpsychology.com
