Support #961
open
Number of years in education and individual income
Added by Paul Jones over 6 years ago.
Updated over 1 year ago.
Category:
Questionnaire content
Description
I am currently writing my dissertation on the impact of occupation on the self-rated health outcomes of British workers. I have created model to estimate the effect of nine occupational categories on the self-reported general health of individuals, while controlling for age, education and income. For my education variable I wanted to include a continuous variable detailing the number of years an individual has in education. I have currently been using the school leaving age and further education leaving age variables but this does not reflect the amount of education a person has received. I have not been able to think of a way to do this. Is this possible to do using the Understanding Society dataset?
In addition, I am using the variable "a_paygu_dv" detailing a person's usual gross pay per month. However, the values this variable takes seem strange. For example, some respondents have income as small as £1.08 and others as large as £150,000. Should I be excluding certain cases.
Thanks,
Paul
- Status changed from New to In Progress
- Assignee changed from Alita Nandi to Stephanie Auty
- % Done changed from 0 to 10
- Private changed from Yes to No
Many thanks for your enquiry. The Understanding Society team is looking into it and we will get back to you as soon as we can.
Best wishes,
Stephanie Auty - Understanding Society User Support Officer
- % Done changed from 10 to 50
Dear Paul,
There is no official way to create years of education in Understanding Society. The reason is probably that in the UK context years of education is not considered a good measure of the amount of education received, years of education is used much more in the US literature. Many people here instead use dummy variables for the highest educational degree a person has obtained to control for education. If you still want to construct years of education, another way to go about this would be to use highest educational degree and assign each degree the standard years of study.
I hope to follow up shortly with an answer to your second question.
Best wishes,
Stephanie Auty - Understanding Society User Support Officer
- Status changed from In Progress to Feedback
- Assignee changed from Stephanie Auty to Paul Jones
- % Done changed from 50 to 80
Dear Paul,
The income values in w_paygu_dv are valid, and should only be excluded if they are causing problems in the models you are fitting.
Best wishes,
Stephanie Auty - Understanding Society User Support Officer
- Status changed from Feedback to Resolved
- % Done changed from 80 to 100
- Category changed from Data analysis to Questionnaire content
Also available in: Atom
PDF
Updated by Stephanie Auty 
Updated by