Purpose: To investigate the comparability of sample data from different sources. In particular, by making use of the case of employment, we investigate the impact of asking a single question measuring the respondents’ perception of their employment status as applied to the ESS and on the other hand by using the published EU-LFS results that are based on the complex ILO official definition.
Method: The Greek data of ESS for 2002 (Round 1), 2004 (Round 2), 2008 (Round 4) and 2010 (Round 5) are compared with the respective quarters of the published EU-LFS data. Also, the Greek census microdata from IPUMS-International (2001) are used as a quality check.
Results: The findings show that when comparing the employment status of 2001 IPUMS-International and 2002 EU-LFS data there is only a slight difference between the frequency distributions. However, when the ESS data is compared to the respective quarters of EU-LFS, there are significant differences between the frequency distributions.
Conclusions: Our results indicate that there are differences in peoples’ perception of their employment status and the ILO official definition.
Keywords: ESS, EU-LFS, ILO, IPUMS-International, employment status
Professor Clive Richardson, Panteion University