Hi there. I am using a CPS extract from January 2020-Feb 2025 and I have question about the ACTSAME variable. The codes for this variable are “Yes,” “No,” “Refused,” “Don’t Know,” and “NIU.” Under the IPUMS description, it says that this variable “indicates whether or not the respondent’s usual work activities or duties have changed during the previous month.” This seems to suggest that responses coded as “Yes” would indicate that the respondent’s usual work activities have changed in the first month. However, when I tabulate this variable in my dataset, over 98% of observations responded “yes” to this question. My concern is that it doesn’t seem reasonable that 98% of the sample’s work activities or duties would have changed in the last month. It seems much more reasonable that 98% of the sample’s work activities have stayed the same while around 2% of the sample’s activities have changed. The questionnaire text for this question is unavailable on the IPUMS website. However, I found this question in the Basic CPS Items Booklet “IODP2:
Have the usual activities and duties of (your/his/her) job changed since last month? 1 Yes; 2 No,” that seems to correspond with this variable. This question appears to match IPUMS description, and again suggests that a “Yes” indicates a change in work duties. Still, the high prevalence of “Yes” responses feels off intuitively. Is it possible that the coding of this variable is reversed? Or that something happened during the harmonization process that altered the interpretation of the codes? I’d appreciate any clarification on how this variable should be interpreted.
Thank you for bringing this to our attention. I agree that this is confusing; while the label for ACTSAME (“Still have the same work activities”) provides the correct interpretation of the data, the information in the description tab that you cite is unclear.
The original question associated with ACTSAME (PUIODP2 in the PUMS codebook) is “Have the usual activities and duties of your job changed since last month?” In the harmonization process, we swap “Yes” and “No” responses to this question to create ACTSAME so that it reports whether a respondent still had the same work activities. Respondents who answered “Yes” to having a change in their activities/duties in the original question are coded as “No” in ACTSAME and vice-versa. I have a note out to my colleagues to look into improving this documentation.