I have downloaded the January Job Tenure and Occupational Mobility Supplement data. The vast majority of the entries list 0 as the occupation for the previous year (“jtocc” field), coded as “NIU” in the “jtocc1990” field. In the “jtresp” field however, most of these are coded as “Eligible, interviewed”.
As an idea of the magnitude, in the 2014 data out of 131,554 observations, 128,677 list the occupation in the “jtocc” field as 0, even though 49,593 of these were listed as “Eligible, interviewed”.
Do you know why this is the case - that there are so few data entries for previous year’ occupation, even though these people seem to have been interviewed?
Thank you so much!
It looks like the universe statements for these variables are simply incorrect. The data is correct. The only people who were actually asked about their occupation last year in the Job Tenure Supplement were those who reported NOT having the same occupation during the past year. I’ve discussed this with the IPUMS CPS Team and they have made the appropriate changes. These changes will be reflected online with the next data release.
I think there’s a mistake on the online documentation, The universe for JTOCC listed online says “Persons age 15 or older who were employed in the reference week at the same job they had last year.” Shouldn’t this instead be people who DID NOT have the same job last year? Similar to prior years?
https://cps.ipums.org/cps-action/variables/jtocc#universe_section
You are correct, that is an error in the universe statement. The IPUMS CPS team is aware of this and will fix it during the next documentation update.