Understanding Society User Support

Good afternoon,

I have a query about some of the pensions data in Understanding Society.

Specifically, I have two queries about how the above variables are treated in Waves 6 and 12 of Understanding Society, and a third more general query:

1. In Wave 6, I notice that a "raw" (unweighted) figure of 579 employees (ie people who are jbsemp = 1) report inapplicable (-8) for whether their workplace has a pension (jbpen). This appears to be the only wave where any employees are inapplicable for this question. It doesn't make sense that any would be inapplicable, since Understanding Society documentation shows every employee should be asked this question, and the questionnaire for Wave 6 (see pp. 295-296) has the same routing as the other waves. Is this a coding error? If so, should these people instead be marked to say either (a) they don't have an employee pension (jbpen = 2) or perhaps (b) not available for IEMB (jbpen = -10)? I know there are some in the IEMB who weren't asked this question in Wave 6, so perhaps it is (b).

2. I notice that in Wave 12, you have discontinued the ppen and ppreg questions. So there appears to be no data on whether workers, whether employees or self-employed, contribte to a personal pension (ppen) and if so, how regularly they contribute (ppreg). Is there a particular reason why this has been discontinued that I need to be aware of - eg is there an issue with the data in prior waves? Or perhaps I've missed a renamed variable in Wave 12?

3. You probably can't help with this final query, but I notice that in every wave, about 200-500 employees say "don't know" to jbpen. Could you shed any light on why this is? I'm wondering if there is any justification for judging that these respondents evidently don't have a workplace pension, since they don't know if one exists, but this will depend on the context of how the question is asked - I assume there is no definitive way of knowing.

Hope this makes sense but do flag if anything is unclear. Many thanks in anticipation.

Best wishes,

Tom