Each year, respondents to the HILDA Survey are asked to describe the occupation and
industry of their current job and / or their previous job. These verbatim responses are then
coded to standard occupation and industry codeframes.
In 2006, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) updated the standard occupation and
industry codeframes (the old and new codeframes are listed in Table 1). With input from the
HILDA External Reference Group, the HILDA Survey team decided to have the wave 1 to 6
responses recoded to these new codeframes (this is in addition to the original coding to the
old codeframes undertaken each wave). It was also decided that from wave 7 onwards, only
the new codeframes would be used.
Analysis of the recoding work has lead to an investigation of the quality of the coding work
undertaken. This paper describes the coding process, provides several indicators of the
quality of the coding and offers recommendations for future work.