Microdata

The principal challenge to studying grandparents and their relationships with their adult children and grandchildren is the need to link related individuals who live in different households. In most public use census and survey data, a grandparent cannot be linked to family members who are not part of the same household. The relationships between individuals who do not live together are unknown. Names or family relationship links are not provided in public data.
 

This means that researchers interested in studying grandparents using IPUMS data will usually need to study grandparents who live with their child(ren) and grandchild(ren). The household roster in most IPUMS data collections allows users to observe the age and sex of each household member. The family interrelationship variables (sometimes present in the original data, and sometimes constructed by IPUMS using linking rules) provide further information about how household members are related to each other. For example, a pointer variable reports the person number of each individual’s mother, if their mother is in the household. Users can leverage these sets of variables to determine the number of generations in a household and how each individual is related to one another. Read more about how IPUMS has constructed family interrelationship variables for IPUMS USA and IPUMS CPS.

Limiting a study to only grandparents who are co-resident with their child(ren) and grandchild(ren) has drawbacks. Sample sizes will be relatively small, and may be unusable depending on the data collection used and other restrictions placed on the study population. Grandparents who live with these family members are also a selected group; they are likely systematically different from the general population of grandparents. 
 

Researchers who wish to study co-resident grandparents can do so using most IPUMS data collections that provide microdata (i.e., not IPUMS NHIGS or IPUMS IHGIS). Some data collections are more suitable than others. See a few relevant collection-specific notes below:
 

• In recent NHIS samples, studying the relationships between household members is nearly impossible, as even basic demographic information (e.g., age and sex) is unavailable for household members other than the sample adult and sample child.
• Three variables in IPUMS USA provide information on living with and caring for grandchildren: GCHOUSE, GCRESPON, and GCMONTHS. 
• In IPUMS ATUS, users can study time spent with grandchildren, even if they do not live in the same household. Users can also study time spent on caring for grandparents, even if they do not live in the same household.
• IPUMS USA provides historical linked data from the U.S. decennial census, allowing researchers to observe individuals and households across decades. These links make it possible to identify grandparents who do not live with their grandchildren in some cases.
• A variable called MULTGEN, which reports the number of generations in each household, is available from IPUMS USA and from IPUMS CPS.

Example studies of grandparents and grandchildren using IPUMS data

• Glaser, K., Stuchbury, R., Price, D., Di Gessa, G., Ribe, E., & Tinker, A. (2018). Trends in the prevalence of grandparents living with grandchild(ren) in selected European countries and the United States. European journal of ageing, 15(3), 237-250.
• Kwon, S. J. (2024). Grandparents and parental labor supply during the COVID-19 pandemic. Review of Economics of the Household, 22(3), 935-964.

Suggested citation

Pastoor, Isabel. 2026. “Under the Same Roof: Identifying Grandparents in IPUMS Data.” University of Minnesota Life Course Center, October 28, 2026. https://lcc.umn.edu/node/2246.