Data from Survey of Household Spending
Mar 20th, 2009 by brett
Question
I was wondering if you could help me with some data. I am interested in
the Survey of Household Spending, in particular, spending by age group
over time. I am looking for the Canadian data in this chart:
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/75-001-x/2007109/c-g/4168846-eng.htm
=20
with some sort of breakdown between expenditures on goods vs. services.
I checked the Cansim tables that go with this survey (203-0001 to
203-0020), but there doesn’t seem to be any breakdown by age, just by
province.
Answer
The PUMFs for the SHS do provide ages or age groups. Laine Ruus has provided the following instructions on how to use the public use microdata to achieve the desired breakdowns:
“Easy enough to create with the microdata, no? An online tool such as SDA, Nesstar (with recoding enabled), or (?)VDC should do just those 2 years (1982 and 2003) in a couple of minutes. Just collapse the age categories for the reference person/household head to 10-year age categories, and run a comparison of means on the total expenditure variable. The 1982 survey has age as actual years of age, and the 2003 survey has age as 5-year age groups.
The breakdown by goods versus services would require computing total expenditures for goods and services, or probably more easily, a total for services, and then subtract that from the total expenditure for the goods total. Eg the 2003 survey has a total of 31 variables specifically labelled ‘services’ in the variable label or question text, which could be combined into one services total.”
The other alternative would be to request a custom tabulation (for a fee) from the Division.