Hi, I have been analyzing detailed occupations’ trend by their employment status using ASEC data. Tabulating OCCLY across CLASSWLY, I found that for the three religious occupations (OCCLY == 2040, 2050, and 2060), their number of employees have plummeted in the 2020 ASEC whereas the number of self-employed almost replaced that of the employees. But for other years, it is not the case. Is this a coding error or the method of classification changed in the 2020 ASEC for these three occupations?
I attached two images, one ploted using the raw respondents number, the other using ASEC weights (Covid weights are used whenever it is available). The three occupations are: 2040 Clergy; 2050 Directors, religious activities and education; and 2060 Religious workers, all other.
I was able to replicate this strange pattern and can confirm that this was the result of an error in the original ASEC file released by the Census Bureau (see footnote 17). In looking into your question, we discovered that the Census Bureau released a revised version of the 2020 ASEC file on 4/1/21 (six months after we released the file on IPUMS CPS using the version of the data that was publicly available at that time). The revised file made corrections to four variables: LJCW (harmonized by IPUMS into CLASSWLY), two other variables that are recoded versions of LJCW (CLWK and WECLW), and NOEMP (harmonized by IPUMS into FIRMSIZE).
I downloaded this new version from the Census Bureau ASEC data page and it appears to have fixed the issues with CLASSWLY that you are finding for these occupations. I will let our team know that the file was updated so that they can incorporate these changes into one of our upcoming data releases. In the meantime, you might consider downloading the 2020 ASEC file directly from the Census Bureau and merging it with an IPUMS data extract in order to obtain the corrected data. You can merge person records across the two files using the linking keys HRHHID, HRHHID2, and LINENO (referred to as PULINENO in the CB data).
Thank you for bringing this to our attention!
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