Text
POLY2ND indicates if a woman was the second or higher order wife linked to a husband in the constructed IPUMS variable SPLOC -- Spouse's Location in Household. The variable does not suggest the actual marital order of wives, only their relative positions in the person order of the household as it was enumerated.
The point of POLY2ND is to facilitate using SPLOC in samples that identify polygamy. Some statistical matching procedures expect to find only one matching record for each subject record.