Is the OCC2 variable harmonized across the years in ATUS-X, given that the occupation coding system used in the ATUS changed after 2010? The documentation on your website indicates that OCC2 is comparable across years. But I thought I should double check about whether it is because the ATUS variable dictionary for the 2003-2015 multi-year data file has an occupation variable called TRMJOCGR that matches OCC2 (with the exception that it aggregates a few of the categories in OCC2), but the documentation states that the variable is not strictly comparable across years.
A previous discussion on this forum discusses whether the OCC variable is harmonized, but does not discuss the OCC2 variable. So I thought I should post my question. Thank you very much.
OCC2 is based on OCC and is not strictly “harmonized” across years. But, at the level of detail used by OCC2 (which is equivalent to the 2-digit SOC codes), there was no change between the 2000 and 2010 SOC system, which means the change in coding of OCC in 2011 did not affect OCC2.
Regarding comparability: IPUMS generally uses the word “comparable” to mean that the question or concept is the same across time, even if the available codes vary. The OCC questions are comparable across time, even though the system used to code the responses changed in 2011. This may be different from how the word is used in ATUS technical documentation.
Thank you very much for your response. It sounds like using the OCC2 variable in an analysis using data spanning the years 2003-2015 will work just fine, given that the change in coding did not affect OCC2.