Quality of the Occupation and Industry Coding in the HILDA Survey

Abstract

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.