There are unrecoded Occupation data in each census. However, after downloading the occupation column only displays the occupation code without any value label, making it difficult for me to analyse the data. Is there a way for me to retrieve the value labels efficiently
OCC provides the unharmonized year-specific occupation codes for sample respondents. The same codes will correspond to different occupations across years. For this reason, it’s not possible to provide consistent labels for OCC. You will need to refer to the list of occupations to cross-reference the codes for OCC for each sample year.
If you plan to analyze occupation across multiple years of data, you may be interested in one of the IPUMS created harmonized occupation codes (i.e. OCC1930, OCC1950, OCC1990, and OCC2010). While each of these variables classify occupations based on their own year-specific scheme, they group similar types of work across years as new occupations appear and old ones become obsolete, allowing researchers to examine changes in labor over time. The process for creating these variables is discussed further in the user guide on integrated occupations.