Understanding Society User Support

Dear Julia,

The variable kleslen shows the length of each spell. So creating a variable for total work experience would involve summing the values of kleslen across all spells for each PID.

We hope this helps, best wishes, Victoria

Many thanks for your follow-up question, which I will add here (and close the new issue):

Many thanks! Just to clarify further, would that mean that for my example above 45 and 609 should be summed up to obtain the working experience of pid 95200258?
I was also wondering if such a variable can be found for Wave R in BHPS because I saw that it was constructed only for waves b, k and l.

We are looking into this and will get backto you as soon as we can. Best wishes, Victoria.

Dear Julia,

Apologies for the delay in responding to your follow-up question.

Yes , their work experience would be summed up as you suggest. These data are from the employment status histories which mainly cover work experience before people entered the panel and hence are only present at wave B (initial sample), K (Scotland and Wales boost) and L (Northern Ireland boost). They do not cover subsequent work experience which is reported at each wave of the panel. Unfortunately we do not have derived variables which directly computes this, but in principle it can be computed by summing up the sequence of wNJBWKS variables from each wave which shows work weeks in year before each wave at which participants are interviewed.

Best wishes, Victoria.