Support #2274
openIdentifying self-employed individuals (jbstat vs. jbsemp)
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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 21 days ago
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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
Updated by Carolin Heuser 20 days ago
Hello,
Thank you for the response!
Best,
Carolin Heuser
Updated by Understanding Society User Support Team 8 days ago
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