SEMPL – Employment Details and Summary

OVERVIEW

The employment module for the 2006 graduate-sibling instrument differs slightly from both the 1993-1994 graduate-sibling instrument and the 2004 graduate instrument.  In this wave, graduate-sibling respondents were asked about up to two jobs – their current or last job (held for six months or more) and the first job they retired from.  As a result, respondents who were in the labor force since the last survey fall into one of three categories.  Those who had not retired from any job but were in the labor force at some point were asked about their current or last job (variables ???).  They are assigned inappropriate (-2) codes for the preretirement jobs (variables ???).  For respondents whose last job and job of first retirement are the same (indicated by variable cof79re), the information from the last job was copied into the appropriate variables for the first retirement job.  Finally, respondents who first retired from a job other than their current or last job were asked about both jobs.  Respondent's who had never been in the labor market are assigned inappropriate (-2) codes for the entire module.

After the roster of employment history details, respondents were asked more detailed questions about a selected employer.  The selected employer was the current or last employer for each respondent.  

The variable about union membership (cf023jcc) was in the employment module in the previous wave.  Now it is asked in the job characteristics section (see COR 958)
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BRIEF VARIABLE DESCRIPTIONS

	cf101re			employment history summary variable

  Current/Last Job Information

	cf047ree & cf050red	start and end dates for current/last job
	
	cf048red & cf148red	hours worked per week and full-time/part-time status

	cfa48ree & cf049red	City and State of current/last job spell

	cfu54red – cf067ree	Current/Last job Census occupation and industry codes, 				class of worker, occupational status and prestige scores

	cf069rec – cf170rec	Current/Last job pension and health insurance availability 				and participation

	cf073rec – cf075re	reasons left or laid off current/last job spell
	
	cf076re – cf078re	Current/Last job employer details

First Retirement Job Information

	cf079re		has respondent ever retired

	cf080ree & cf081red	start and end dates for current/last job
	
	cf082red & cf182red	hours worked per week and full-time/part-time status

	cf083red – cf090ree	Current/Last job Census occupation and industry codes, 				class of worker, occupational status and prestige scores

	cf091rec – cf192rec	Current/Last job pension and health insurance availability 				and participation

       	 cf096re		Whether health insurance coverage caused R to remain on 				the job longer than they otherwise would have.

CODING
 
   Occupation and Industry codes

Occupation and industry codes were coded by specially trained coders to be compatible with the 1990 definitions that were used in the previous wave.  Major industry and occupation codes are assigned according to COR 681.  The occupational prestige, occupational education, and occupational income scores were assigned in exactly as they were in the 1992/93.  The current code is displayed in cor960.sas.  Also see COR 680 and COR 683 for the Nakao-Treas prestige score, COR 639 and COR 684 for details, and a recommended transformation of the occupational education and occupational income scores from the 1992/3 graduate documentation.

  Class of Worker codes
	
A series of three questions was used to identify the respondents’ class of worker code (b81q40, b81q45, b81q55).  On the whole these three questions were unproblematic.  However, the first question in the series included an ‘other-specify’ option despite the fact that the other options were exhaustive (did you work for government, private company/organization, self-employed, work in a family business).  This required us to assign the correct code based on the comments in the other-specify option.  Most of the time it was straightforward to do this based on the name of their employer.  Two recurring confusing situations were, people who worked for non-profit organizations and were not sure if they are included in private organizations (they are) and people who work for public corporations in the sense of that they were publicly traded in stock markets (also included in the second category).  In ambiguous cases, we used the following decision rules to do this:
•	If the respondent was reporting on the same job they held at the time of the last survey, we used that response in the current survey.
•	If a person reported being self-employed in a family business we assigned them a code of ‘3 – self-employed’.
•	In cases where it was unclear to the respondent if it was government or not (especially for school and hospital employees), we conducted an internet search to try and resolve it and only assigned a code if the institution remained public or had definitely been private at the time the respondent worked there.
•	If the correct response remained ambiguous after all of these steps we set the code to ‘-4 – not ascertained’.

   Reason laid off
	
The code set for reason the respondent was laid off was also developed from the responses.  There codes fall into 4 major categories: individual level reasons (1-9), firm level reasons (10-19), economy level reasons (20-29), and other reasons (30-39).  See cor851b.rtf for a thorough definition of codes and general guidelines. 

   Reason left job

The code set for reason the respondent left their job was developed from responses.  There are four major categories of the codes: voluntary work related reasons (0-19), voluntary non-work related reasons (20-39), involuntary work related reasons (40-59), and involuntary non-work related reasons (60-79).  See cor851c.rtf for a list of these codes.

PROBLEMS

We  had to correct the class of worker codes (gfu07j1c, etc…) if the respondent responded with the open ended choice.  Since the existing categories are exhaustive, all respondents were recoded back into one of the six categories.

A bug in the program caused 1382 cases to skip the city and state questions for the current/last employment spell.  The instrument only went to these questions if the respondent answered yes to whether they participated in their employers health insurance program.  All such cases are coded -4.

PEOPLE
	
Carl Frederick – employment history variable creation, correcting raw data, supervising open ended coding, writing the cor
	
Erin Wicke – open ended coding, correcting raw data

O&I coders ???

REFERENCES

1990 Census Detailed Occupation and Industry codes:  "1990 Census of 	Population and Housing Classified Index of Industries and Occupations."  1990 	CPH-R-4, 1992.
        
   	1990 Occ Ed and Occ Inc scores: Hauser, Robert M. 
    	and John Robert Warren.  1997.  "Socioeconomic Indexes for Occupations:  
    	A Review, Update, and Critique."  Pp. 177-298 in _Sociological 
    	Methodology_, edited by Adrian Raftery. Cambridge: Blackwell.

   	1989 Nakao-Treas Prestige Rating: Nakao, Keiko and Judith 
   	Treas.  1994.  "Updating Occupational Prestige and Socioeconomic 
   	Scores: How the New Measures Measure Up."  Pp. 1-72 in _Sociological 
    	Methodology, 1994_, edited by Peter Marsden. Washington, D.C.: American 
    	Sociological Association.