Support #2274
open
Identifying self-employed individuals (jbstat vs. jbsemp)
50%
Description
Dear members of the support team,
I am using the UKHLS to analyse the well-being of self-employed individuals.
For my dataset, I need to filter for self-employed people, and I am uncertain whether to use jbsemp or jbstat.
I have noticed that filtering on jbsemp (self-employed) results in some cases where jbstat is recorded as “retired”, “paid employment”, “family care”, etc. In my current sample, this mismatch occurs in approximately 10% of observations.
Could you kindly clarify how I can interpret cases where jbsemp = self-employed but jbstat is not “self-employed”?
For exampple, if jbstat is "retired" but jbsemp is "self-employed", does this indicate that the person is doing some form of self-employed work while in retirement, or does it reflect their previous employment status before retiring?
For research on currently active self-employed individuals, would it be more suitable to filter for both variables or only one of them?
I would appreciate your support.
Thank you & best regards!
Updated by Understanding Society User Support Team about 19 hours ago
- Category set to Data documentation
- Status changed from New to Feedback
- % Done changed from 0 to 50
- Private changed from Yes to No
Hello Carolin,
In "jbstat", respondents report their main activity status. For example, someone could select “4 – retired”, but may still have had a job (either as an employee or self-employed) in the week before the interview. In that case, they would select jbhas = 1, which routes them to the question "jbsemp – Are you an employee or self-employed?"
It depends on what you are interested in measuring: jbsemp refers to employment status during the interview week, whereas jbstat reports their general/main status.
I hope this information is helpful.
Best wishes,
Roberto Cavazos
Understanding Society User Support Team