Understanding Society User Support

Hi Megan,
sorry for the delay in response. All our code to derive socio-economic classifications relies on SOC 2000. The look-up file we use for the current job RGSC classification (_JBRGSC_DV) relies on occupation (SOC2000, _JBSOC00) and employment status (ES2000, _JBES2000). In the online variable documentation you can see that the latter depends on _JBSEMP _JBMNGR _JBSIZE _JSSIZE _JSBOSS. Comparable information is not available in the youth questionnaire (note that this is the occupation young people would like to do, not an occupation they are already working in!).

https://www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/documentation/mainstage/dataset-documentation/wave/1/datafile/a_indresp/variable/a_jbes2000

There may be ways to generate ES2000 by making assumptions about what the typical employment status for a given occupation is - fyi: ONS provides documentation on how this can be done in the context of deriving NS-SEC (and we use this cross-walk to derive parent's SOC, see, e.g., _PANSSEC_DV).

On 'translating' SOC 1990 codes to SOC 2000 codes, I am afraid we have not got a solution for you. We code occupations from the freetext information we collect during the interview, shortly after fieldwork is completed. During the first waves of the BHPS, SOC 2000 did not exist as a code frame so it was not possible to code the freetext to that level. Subject to additional resourcing it may be possible to try and code this to SOC 2000/2010 in the future. But it is quite possible that the freetext information is not detailed enough to assign a SOC code, e.g., when the occupation split into different specialisations. Again, ONS may have some advise on whether and how the missing values may be imputed.

Sorry to not be of more help,
Gundi