Understanding Society User Support

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

Dear Rob,

There are a variety of reasons for these missing values as follows:

As you say, some are rising 16s who were not asked these questions – some of these had parents who responded when the respondent was 14 and so these values can be used as in Alita’s code.

The parents’ occupation questions were not asked in Waves 2-7 of BHPS, so anyone who joined during those waves will have that information missing.

These questions were not asked as part of a proxy interview, so if a respondent’s first interview was a proxy interview they will not have been asked, and if the respondent answered “don’t know” then the value in xwavedat will also be missing. You can check if these either of these situations were the case in the indresp file for each wave.

The largest group of missing values in pasoc and masoc are those in the Northern Ireland part of the sample which was added at Wave 11. These respondents’ parents’ jobs were not coded to SOC90, but only to SOC2000. The values of pasoc and masoc in xwavedat are based on the job status on the SOC90 code, but you can pick up these values by going back to the indresp files for each wave from 11 onwards. One thing to understand here is that wmaju and wpaju only have valid responses if the parent was not working. If they were working then this is recorded in their SOC code, i.e. for NI respondents in wmasoc00 and wpasoc00. paseg and maseg should be coded as usual for NI respondents.

SOC and SEG codes are coded from free text so if it was not possible to tell what code to give from what was written during the interview then the data will also be missing.

Parents’ education is only asked at Wave 13 of BHPS so anyone who did not respond at that wave will not have been asked, and proxy respondents were not asked.

Once again, apologies for a delayed reply, and please get in touch if there's anything else we can help with.

Best wishes,
Stephanie Auty - Understanding Society User Support Officer