Abstract
The improvement of the comparability of demographic and socio-economic variables across the countries of the world has been on the United Nations’ agenda for decades now. UN specialised agencies have developed standard classifications for the measurement of education, occupation and other labour market variables. These instruments are also suitable for use in academically driven social research. Building on the UN standard classifications, academic social researchers have developed scales for the measurement of prestige, status and nominal class categories and for the classification of the socio-economic status of respondents. Although the UN has not developed any instruments for the standardised survey measurement of the third core status variable – household income – statisticians and social researchers can avail of standards that have been developed by a UN.
Keywords
- Unit Group
- International Labour Organization
- European Social Survey
- International Standard Classification
- Occupational Title
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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- 1.
The authors would like to point out that neither the respondents, nor – in all probability – the interviewers, and in some cases not even the field institute, were aware of this objective because the information was contained only in the instructions for the national coordinator of the ESS.
- 2.
Text of item in the Austrian questionnaire: ‘F6: What is the highest level of education that you have achieved?’ (ipr – Sozialforschung, 2003, our back-translation).
- 3.
In the fourth round of the ESS, which was fielded in 2008 (see ESS, 2008e), clarifications were added, the target variable was stated more precisely, and the mappings with which the national educational programmes are coded into the international standard were made available to the survey coordinators.
- 4.
The field interviews were conducted in the course of 2009.
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Hoffmeyer-Zlotnik, J.H.P., Warner, U. (2014). Existing Measurement Instruments for Data Collection. In: Harmonising Demographic and Socio-Economic Variables for Cross-National Comparative Survey Research. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7238-0_3
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