Creation of a Child Well-Being Index Using the Survey of Income and Program Participation

Carolyn A. Hronis, U.S. Census Bureau

This paper utilizes data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to create an individual-level child well-being index. Using Kenneth Land’s framework, I assign SIPP variables to seven domains and use a factor analysis to analyze if these variables load together on specific factors that reasonably represent the domains. I find that six domains, consisting of socio-economic characteristics, school engagement, safety, parental support, social interaction, and parental involvement are a better fit for the SIPP data. I assign values to each indicator based on these factor loading results and weight the domains by their contribution to the measure, to produce an index for each child in the sample. To aid in interpretation, I divide the sample into quartiles and look at the distribution of children in each quartile by various demographic characteristics.