Recent occupation concepts applied to historical Census data



Recent occupation concepts applied to historical Census data

Peter B. Meyer

US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Office of Productivity and Technology[1]

Dec 31, 2008

Preliminary and incomplete. Please do not quote or cite yet.

Introduction

The U.S. Census has collected occupational information every ten years since 1850 from practically the whole U.S. work force. In principle this makes possible detailed comparisons of the work force over time,[2] but there are a number of practical challenges to doing this. The purpose of this paper is to collect, from various source, estimates of the magnitude of the work force from past years who would have an occupation by today’s definitions, but who were not recorded as having an occupation by the Census of the time.

The definitions and coverage have changed over time for several categories and the paper highlights some of the conceptual issues and changes in definition. In brief: at the time of the 1940 census, the current concept of the labor force and the set of persons who were employed or unemployed or otherwise had an occupation were established. This paper does not investigate the small changes in definition since then. There is believed to be an undercount of persons in every census, and that this undercount has declined since 1940, and this means the workforce is underestimated too, but this paper does not address that issue of missing data.

In the years between 1870 and 1930, there were differences in coverage of women and of Native Americans from the ways that would apply now. There were other smaller differences in defining occupations to be discussed in the paper. In the 1850 and 1860 censuses the measures were quite different from the present. Occupations were not recorded for slaves at that time, and other classification differences from the present were also large.

At the end of the paper there are some numerical estimates, drawn almost entirely from other sources. First, we review the historical changes that lead us to have the occupation numbers and categories we have now.

Census of Population practices and occupation collection overview

A U.S. Census of Population has been conducted each ten years since 1790, because the U.S. Constitution required there be a count of persons by locality to help define representative political districts and fair taxation across the states. The census data would support changes decennially (every ten years) so that as citizens moved and grew in number, the political districts electing the House of Representatives would adapt. The framers of the Constitution also required that any direct taxes imposed by Congress would fall fairly and proportionately on the populations of the states. For the first century, the counts were collected by marshals, from the national law enforcement arm of the courts. The constitution required a separate count of the slave and free population. (Anderson Conk 1980, p.8)

The Constitution did not call for collecting occupation or industry data, but it was repeatedly suggested that it should (including by James Madison). In 1820, there was a question about how many persons, including slaves, worked in three general economic sectors, agriculture, commerce, or manufactures. These are by current conceptions industry information, not occupational information. In the 1840 census, respondents were to be asked the same questions within these seven (industry) categories: mining; agriculture; commerce; manufactures and trades; navigation of the oceans; navigation of canals, lakes, and rivers; and learned professions and engineers. Again it appears slaves were included (Hunt, 1909). Starting in 1850 and ever since then, many respondents were asked more precisely for their profession, trade, or occupation.

In the 1850 census, "profession, occupation, or trade" was requested but only of free males over 15. 323 occupations were presented in the results, summarized under ten general headings: commerce; trade; manufactures; mechanic arts and mining; agriculture; law, medicine, and divinity; other pursuits requiring education; government, civil service; domestic servants; and other occupations. In around 1851 Joseph Kennedy visited the statistical offices of several European countries. (Details to add)

The 1860 census was very similar to 1850, but now all free persons over 15, now including females, were asked an occupation. An alphabetical list of 584 occupations was presented in the results, according to Hunt (1909).[3] The 1850 and 1860 results were poor, in some unspecified sense, in Hunt's view. (p470)

In 1870, General Francis Walker took charge as the Superintendent of the Census. Marshals continued to do the collection. The inquiry of occupation now went to all person over 10 years of age. Starting with the 1880 census, marshals no longer collect the data. The President appointed a Superintendent of the Census, and supervisors and enumerators were hired. Hunt (1909) reported that quality improved with the 1890 and 1900 Censuses. The Bureau redefined the occupational category system each decade. The category system became elaborated in detail about manufacturing in the early 1900s. It was a large scale activity. Hunt reports there were more than 25 million copies of instructions and forms ("schedules") for the 1900 population census of pop, and several hundred supervisors, and 53,000 enumerators. The task was rushed.

There were more discussions of standardization across countries in the early 1890s. "The International Institute of Statistics [recommended at its 1893 session] an international classification of occupations ... and in 1907 named a commission to prepare a technological glossary, in English, French, and German, of the designations of industries and occupations which have been employed in the censuses of leading countries, accompanied by a brief but exact description of the character of the work covered by each term so used ... [The commission's] first report is to be made ... [in] Paris, in May, 1909." Wright and Hunt, 1909. Citing the category system described by Bertillon (1893).

Until this time, the Census infrastructure was temporary, existing just for a couple of years before and after each decade’s canvass. In 1902, Congress established a permanent Bureau to conduct this and other surveys and analyses. This was expected to reduce loss of knowledge and skills between Censuses and sustain a staff of professionals. Other countries had done this around the same time.

A key analytical advance in 1910 was to ask two new questions along with the occupation question which give the basic job facts. One was what “industry” the employer was in. The other asked whether the respondent was an employee, or self employed, or an employer (Anderson Conk, 1978). The existence of these related questions allow the occupation question to break off from the sources of revenue and ask about the worker’s own function or tasks.

Alba Edwards was in charge of the occupational statistics from 1910 to 1940, and gradually reduced the use of industry information to classify the occupation. He had a strong preference for an occupation system to give information about the skills and intelligence of the worker. In the absence of measurable data about this he was sometimes reduced to making inferences from demographic information about the workers. He acknowledged that “certain specific occupations which technically are skilled occupations were classified as semiskilled because the enumerators [found] so many children, young persons, and women as pursuing these occupations as to render the occupations semiskilled, even though each of them did contain some skilled workers” (Edwards, 1917). Looked at from currently standard concepts, in which occupation is a structural, functional classification of workers, Edwards improved the analytical precision of the occupation categories by helping excise industry concepts from them, but clouded them by de facto including demographic or social-economic elements. For a more thorough discussion see Anderson Conk (1978, 1980).

The 1950 category system appears to have a good reputation among academics. Matt Sobek of the project extended its reach to the entire span of 1850-2000, with jobs matched as well as possible from 1950 to the category system of the respondent’s year. Since 1950 the classification has continued to be revised every decade, and in major ways in 1980 and 2000.

Recent occupational classification practices

In recent decades the answers of respondents to the occupation and industry questions in the decennial Census have been encoded into a three-digit occupation code and a three-digit industry code, which are made available in the public-use micro samples. A monthly survey conduced by the same Bureau, called the Current Population Survey, has questions and procedures which are similar to the decennial Census. This data is used to derive unemployment statistics. The following description of practices for the Current Population Survey is similar to the practices for the decennial Census. The respondent (or a proxy respondent like a family member or neighbor) is asked approximately these questions[4] in this order:

• (class of employer) Is this person’s employer a private for-profit company, a nonprofit, self-employed, federal government, state government, or local government?

• What is the name of the person’s employer?

• (industry) What kind of business or industry is it; what do they make or do?

• Is it mainly in manufacturing, retail trade, wholesales rate, or something else?

• (occupation) What kind of work does this person do? (For example: plumber, typist, farmer)

• What are the person’s usual activities or duties at the job? (For example: typing, keeping account books, filing, selling cars, operating printing press, laying brick.)

The answers to these questions, four of which are open-ended text, along with the respondent’s city, state, sex, age, and years of education are made available to specialized “coders” in the Census Bureau’s National Processing Center in Jeffersonville, Indiana. I visited that office and interviewed some of the specialists.

The open-ended answers are in the respondent’s handwriting, digitally scanned from the decennial Census form, or were typed by the CPS interviewer onto a computer then downloaded to the coder’s computer. The coders follow carefully documented procedures to assign a three-digit industry code and an occupation code to the respondent. The open-ended answers are not made available in the public-use samples, and may not be available any more in any form.

The respondent may have given a job title, but in the more challenging cases has given a too-brief description of the tasks. A coder may not be able to assign occupation and industry codes based on the documented procedures, in which case the respondent’s data is forwarded (“referred”) electronically to a specialist called a “referralist.” This occurred in 17% of cases in a large 1997-8 sample (Couper and Conrad, 2001, p. 10). The referralist can match the employer name to a giant list of known employers called the Business Registry (which is the same as an earlier list called the SSEL), and may do a variety of kinds of research on the employer or the words used in the answers to the “kinds of work” and the “activities or duties”. The referralist may look up the employer on the web, and also can refer to a number of books on occupations. Referralists told me that there is some tendency for respondents to over-inflate the importance or prestige of their jobs.

If the job is hard to classify exactly, there are occupation categories for a best-match, usually with the text "not elsewhere classified" abbreviated in the title. For example, in the 1990 categories we see “Engineers, n.e.c.”, “Managers and administrators, n.e.c.,” “  Therapists, n.e.c.” and a dozen others like that. This technique helps keep some categories precise while making room to fit everyone, and by stretching these residual categories it is easier to extend a long time series of a particular category system.

For purpose of this paper, the work force is the set of employed persons. An employed person is one with a job that takes time and is expected to pay the jobholder in money or in goods. The labor force is made up of these employed persons, and also the unemployed who are available to work at a job, and are actively taking steps to find work actively within the week preceding the measurement. These are the modern definitions.

Classifications of the Census data

The main classifications are in Table 1. In all cases I know of, the category systems were determined in advance and the respondent’s self description of the work activity was used by a Census Bureau employee to assign them into one of the categories. When there are multiple numbers of classifications listed in table 1, it's because the sources don't agree. One reason for that is that sometimes industry information was compounded with occupational information. For example Anderson Conk (1980) uses the example of “foreman and overseers (street railway)” which was distinguished from “foreman and overseers (not specified).”

Histories of the occupation statistics treat top officials of the census as having had strong inclinations which affect the way the jobs are reported (notably Anderson Conk, 1980, but also the earlier work). Francis Walker was in charge in 1870 and 1880 and he tended to see the “sector” (industry) as important information to encode in the occupation classification, although since 1920 there is a separate “industry” variable which characterizes the employer’s field of activity. Carroll Wright was in charge for 1890 and 1900. Alba Edwards was an increasingly important official from 1910 to 1940. He tended to elevate the importance of differences between jobs where workers used their heads versus and those where workers used their hands.[5]

In Census-associated secondary surveys of business establishments, employers could offer job titles they used, and not use the decennial census classification. For example, in a 1880 census special survey manufacturing establishments (Weeks, 1884), employers were invited to submit lists of the jobs at their establishment, and these were not standardized. Meyer (2004) standardized these into a set of 300 jobs across all establishments, but it does not match the HISCO classification or the classification in the 1880 census of households.

Summary: history going forward -- the historical process recording the data

■ Census starts in 1790, for political districting and taxation.

❑ Most Native Americans (Indians) were not counted.

■ 1850: Free male respondents first asked for their “Profession, occupation, or trade” by U.S. marshals. Occupations were not categorized.

❑ 1850s: International conferences on occupation collection in Censuses

■ 1860: All free respondents asked for occupation; household head, usually male, is counted distinctively.

■ 1870: Slave category disappears.

■ 1870: Classification of occupations into 338 categories.

■ Since 1870: The category system changed every decade since then.

■ 1880: Data collectors now political appointees not judicial aw enforcers

■ 1902-10: Now permanent civil service bureau collects data and categorizes into occupations. Quality improves.

■ 1940: Switch to “labor force” definitions and concepts, de-gendered

■ Since 1940: Relatively stable definitions and practices.

■ Since 1970: With each new system “dual-coded” data are now available.

Table 1. US Census occupational classifications

Sources: For 1850-60 categories, Hunt (1909). For 1870-1940 categories, Anderson Conk (1980), p. 23. For more recent categories, . For the phrasing of the question, Wright with Hunt (1900).

|Census year |Number of categories |The question asked, or other notes |

|1790-1840 Censuses |  |No specific occupation question |

|1850 | 323 |"Profession, occupation, or trade of each male person over 15 years of |

| | |age" and "Number of slaves" (without further detail on their activities)|

|1860 |584 |"Profession, occupation, or trade of each person, male and female, over |

| | |15 years of age" and "Number of slaves" (without further detail on their|

| | |activities) |

|1870 |338 |"Profession, occupation, or trade of each person, male or female" |

|1880 |276 or 265 |"Profession, occupation, or trade of each person, male or female" over |

| | |age 10 and, of those, months unemployed during the census year. |

| | |Separately, months at school. Full list of occupations is at |

| | | |

|1890 |218 |""Profession, trade, or occupation" and, of those, months unemployed |

| | |during the census year |

|1900 |303 |  |

|1910 |428 or 432 |  |

|1920 |572 or 574 |Full list of occupations is at |

| | | |

|1930 |534 |Full list of occupations is at |

| | | |

|1940 |228, 221, or 451 |Full list of occupations is at |

| | | |

|1950 |287 |Full list of occupations is at |

| | | |

|1960 |296 |Full list of occupations is at |

| | | |

|1970 |441 |Full list of occupations is at |

| | | |

|1980 |504 |"(a) What kind of work was this person doing? (at least two words) (b)|

| | |What were this person's most important activities or duties?" Full list|

| | |of occupations is at |

|1990 |504 |Full list of occupations is at |

| | | |

|2000 US Census (1% sample) |510 |Full list of occupations is at |

| | | |

2. The categories of people at the margins/boundary of occupation definition

Some occupational categories have a clear continuity over time, such as those of doctors, barbers, carpenters, laborers, or public officials. But most of the population was not categorized in an occupation, or was considered in an occupation in some decades but not others. A key principle was that a person's activity was almost always conceived of as an occupation if and only if the person received pay for their time. To clarify this through experience it is helpful to examine some of the sets of people who were sometimes thought of as marginally employed or outside the system of occupations.

Indians. Indians, now called native Americans, were not defined by the Constitution as citizens, and did not have representation in the U.S. and were at first excluded from the Census. The sovereignty of North American Indian nations has been redefined over time. By 1890, there was an ethnic category in the census for “civilized Indians,” apparently meaning more or less the ones who had settled into fixed dwellings and who were willing to be included in the American population. J. David Hacker reports that perhaps 90% of Indians were excluded from the U.S. Census until 1920. In 1890, 1900, and 1910 there were special censuses of Indians, including occupation, but the results were separate from the main Census of Population.[6] This means on the order of 250,000 persons were not in the main occupation counts until 1920.

Slaves. The Constitution required a count of free citizens and a count of slaves. The subject of slavery was very divisive, and after difficult bargaining the framers agreed to count slaves as three-fifths of a person for purposes of a district's representation and taxation, though slaves could not vote and did not themselves pay taxes. The census did not inquire about the occupations of slaves, nor was "slave" defined as an occupation. Some slaves were specialized and skilled however. One can see this as a tourist to George Washington's plantation, where among the slaves there were metalworking and leather specialists, clothing makers, food processors, housekeepers, and farm workers. The standard census form ("schedule") did not ask for this information in the 1850 and 1860 censuses. After that, slavery was abolished legally and as a data category.

Wives and mothers at home. If not employed, these women do not have occupations. This principle is of long standing. But because they were expected to be dependents, women in past decades were less likely to be recorded as having an occupation even if they were employed than they are now. My information on this research comes from Anderson (2002). Bose (2001) evaluated how then-conventional roles for women affected the way the 1900 census data reported female-headed households and formally-unemployed housewives. “Bose estimates that in 1900, 46.4% of women aged 15-64 'worked' in the formal and informal home based economy, compared with a 1994 rate of 58.8%. According to the 1900 census definition, 22.5% of women 'worked'.” (Anderson, pp. 507) Thus using 2000 definitions, twice as many women were working in 1900 than the 1900 census reported. Thus many women in 1900 who were not recorded in an occupation category would, now, be recorded as having an occupation if they submitted the same data to a current census.

Children and students. There is usually a lower bound on persons for whom an occupation can be recorded. Based on the instructions to the enumerators, it was age 15 in the 1850 and 1860 Censuses, there was no age in the 1870 Census, then it was age 10 in 1880. There was no lower age in 1890. In 1940 the lower bound was changed from 10 to 14. In recent years I believe the lower bound age is 16. Being a student has not been defined as an occupation in any year. A youth or student with a part-job is now to be recorded as having an occupation if the job takes (I believe) twenty or more hours per week.

Retired or unemployed. Since the 1970 census, there is classification for the unemployed who have not worked in five years but would be willing to work. A respondent who does not have a job but has had one less than five years ago and seeks one now may describe themselves as having an occupation which is the customary job or a previous job. A retired person, that is one who does not intend to return to a previous line of work, is (since 1940?) conceived of as outside the labor force, and does not have a census-defined occupation (except in those cases where retired is a sort of occupation).

Moen (1994) summarizes the previous literature on the question of whether in the 1880-1910 data including occupation were collected on unemployed older men, even when the persons were really retired permanently. In modern data, there is a retired category in lieu of another occupation. The Census instructions over this period became clearer and clearer in their attempts to get enumerators not to record occupations for retired men but they did not have a sharp category for this.

In general Moen (1994) reports that it is not clear how to distinguish the retired men, although other authors have made imputations of how many were retired. In this paper we accept Moen’s conclusion, and a man who reported an occupation is taken to be intending in the future to work in that occupation. We do not attempt to impute a retired category, although in fact some unknown number of those men were “retired” (in modern language) and were reporting a past occupation, and this is probably a more extreme problem in the earlier years.

Non-citizens and border-crossers. The census is a survey of people who live in the United States. Likewise, persons crossing borders between home and work, legally or otherwise, are counted in the census and their occupations recorded if they live in the U.S. and not if they live in another country. (These numbers can be large. It has been estimated recently is that 11% of Mexico's population lives in the U.S.) In all cases it does not matter whether the employer or the workplace is in the United States. I do not know how far these principles go back. For redistricting purposes, I believe only citizens count.

Military. A person in the military ordinarily has had an income, and was counted in one of a very few general military occupation categories. For the 1990 census, some military persons were categorized more closely by their work activity. For example, in the 1990 data, a physician in the military would be in the occupation “physician”. That change brought those people in alignment with the usual principle that the person’s work tasks or activities, not the employer’s attributes, determines the occupation category. But in 2000, the census returned to the principle that anyone employed by the military is in a strictly military category.

The institutionalized. A persons might be hospitalized, imprisoned, in a government or charity shelter for safety, or in special institutions for the aged or disabled or mentally incapacitated. These persons count in the census, and could be reported to have an occupation but only rarely do.

Tax evaders, illegally working, or doing illegal work. There is no link permitted between an individual’s census data report and law enforcement or tax enforcement. A basic principle is that the census data are to be an accurate count of persons, reporting the world as it is. Therefore a person employed in criminal activities, or not paying taxes on employment may simply report their activity as an occupation to the census. Gambling and prostitution are legal in a few places in the U.S. I believe employment in these is reported in the occupation category “personal service occupations, not elsewhere classified” or some similarly broad classification.

Volunteers, hobbyists, and persons at leisure. A person devoted to volunteering, for example giving tours at a museum without pay, or serving a religious institution or political party without pay, is not employed, therefore these activities have not counted as census occupations. A person delving into a hobby like stamp collecting has not counted as having an occupation. There is however a self-employed category, and a person trying without pay to invent something that will be valuable in the future may probably report himself as self-employed as an inventor, and perhaps this would match an occupation. It is not clear to me whether the rules on this have changed over time.

Apprentices. There were many apprentice occupation categories until 1960. If payment was explicit, then certainly an apprentice had an occupation. If there was no payment in the present but rather the prospect of a job in the future, it is unclear to me whether this would sometimes be defined as employment and an occupation, or a student role.

Households. In the 1850-1860 censuses it seems that households were described as having one occupation, the principal occupation of the household head. Since then, the occupation concept is closely attached to individuals, and never attached to households.

Can’t find, homeless, refused, or traveling. If after some efforts the Census enumerators cannot reach a person, they can accept a secondary report on that household.[7] If the person has no identified home but generally resides in a locality I believe this person is supposed to be included, and some homeless persons do have occupations. A person who is traveling should be recorded, in the district where the person lives (I believe) not where they temporarily are traveling to.

Thorvaldsen (2006) has an enriched, cross-national comparison of this category.

Other undercount. It is known that the Census undercounts the population overall, especially those groups who are disconnected from jobs and families and stable homes. The undercount is believed to be millions of people, though as a fraction of the population has improved over time (Thorvaldsen, 2006). Some of the uncounted persons would have had occupations.

Table 2. Counting of various groups over time

Sources: See above text section

|Category of persons |Relation to occupation categories |

|Indians (Native Americans) |Excluded, by Constitution; over time, most descendants have become U.S. |

| |citizens or showed up in Census data, e.g. could have occupations |

|Slaves |Counted separately; did not have occupations in 1850 or 1860; after that|

| |disappears legally and as a data category |

|Wives and mothers at home |Not counted in 1850. Later, were less likely to be counted as having an|

| |occupation (Bose (2001) especially if it were informal and through an |

| |ethnic enclave. "Bose estimates that in 1900, 46.4% of women aged 15-64|

| |'worked' in the formal and informal home based economy, compared with a |

| |1994 rate of 58.8%. According to the 1900 census definition, 22.5% of |

| |women 'worked'." (Anderson Conk, 2002) |

|Children or students |Minimum age for an occupation has jumped around from 15 to 10 to 14 to |

| |16. "Student" is recorded in some years but is not by usual definition |

| |an occupation. |

|Retired or unemployed |Sometimes these are given categories in the occupation category system |

|Non-citizens and border-crossers |These count if the household location is in the U.S. The location of |

| |the employer doesn’t matter. |

|Institutionalized |In prison, hospital, disabled, charity shelter; these can have an |

| |occupation but usually don't. |

|Working illegally or avoiding tax |Can be categorized in a Census occupation. No link to law enforcement. |

| |However before 1880, Census enumerators were law enforcement officials. |

|Volunteers or hobbyists |Not counted as in an occupation unless they report as self-employed |

|Apprentices |Yes, if paid in money or in kind. If not paid, might be conceived of as|

| |students, and are not employed. |

|Homeless; can't locate; traveling |Can have an occupation based on information from others or remote |

| |location. |

|Refused to answer |Historically a small category. Can have an occupation if enumerator |

| |receives information from others (I believe). Possibly a growing |

| |category. |

Translation and standardization over time

The IPUMS project (at ) has mapped the occupations in all Censuses since 1850 and all CPS years to the 1950 set of occupations. So if one downloads the data from there, almost all employed persons from any year have an assigned occupation from the 1950 occupation classification.

For more precision in recent data, Meyer and Osborne (2005) standardized the 1960-2003 period to have occupations from a harmonized classification based on, but coarser than, the 1990 census classification. This category system is now available as the variable occ1990 from IPUMS. A general issue in this area is that the further in time one tries to translate, the greater the danger that there is no corresponding occupation. For example, the blacksmith category was important in 1880, but has disappeared by 1980. Even more difficult, the computer programmer category is important in 1990, but has no close analogs a century before. Further work to make smarter imputations of an occupation classification from years other than the years in which the data was collected is in Meyer (2006).

3. Estimating the population beyond the boundary: history going backward

In brief the issues are that going from the present back to 1940, there was little change in little change in categories or official coverage, and we do not adjust for undercount. For 1930 and before, women, especially wives, not counted the same way as now. Also the Native Americans and perhaps the unemployed were counted differently. From 1850 to 1910, Native Americans were much less likely to be counted because many were not citizens of the U.S. and did not pay taxes. Before 1900, changing categories of teenagers were counted differently. In 1860, there were slaves, carefully counted, but did not have occupations recorded. In 1850, only men were counted.

The next table has rough estimates:

|Year |total pop in |pop with |women "missing" by|Native Americans|Slaves |

| |millions |occupations (41% |today's definition|not apparently | |

| | |in 1910) |of "occupation" |counted | |

|1850 |23.2 |9.5 |3.72 |0.7 |3.0 |

|1860 |31.4 |12.9 |2.51 |0.6 |4.0 |

|1870 |39.8 |16.3 |3.19 |0.6 | |

|1880 |50.2 |20.6 |4.02 |0.6 | |

|1890 |62.9 |25.8 |5.04 |0.6 | |

|1900 |76.0 |31.2 |6.08 |0.4 | |

|1910 |92.0 |38.0 |7.37 |0.3 | |

|1920 |105.7 |43.3 |8.46 |0.2 | |

|1930 |122.8 |50.3 |9.83 |0.2 | |

Graphing this:

[pic]

Conclusion

Translating occupations over time is helpful for social-scientific comparisons (e.g. the general effects of unionization, licensing, or technological change). But large portions of the population are outside the occupational categories, and the limits have been drawn differently over time. Among the challenges are narrow redefinitions of categories, and insufficient data to match between them. A more difficult qualitative challenge is that whole categories of people have shifted from having no identified occupation, to having one. Specifically, most blacks in the U.S. in 1850 were slaves, and outside the occupation category system. Most Indians were not, then, citizens in the census. And by one estimate, 46% of adult women were working in 1900 if we use current definitions, but only 23% were by the definitions in the 1900 Census. Much of the population have transitioned or been redefined into the officially measured labor force as financial and economic interaction has become pervasive, over and above ethnic, racial, national, and gender categories.

■ Can potentially do a good job matching current job categories back to 1970 using “dual-coded” data sets.

■ It is realistic to apply current occupation categories back to 1940

■ Before 1930, might adjust for adult women in home-based economy and Indians

■ Before 1870, occ data was not categorized and there were slaves

■ In 1850 maybe only 35% of population would have a Census occupation; now over 60%.

■ With more research, it is feasible to get better at this.

Bibliography

Anderson Conk, Margo. 1978. Occupational Classification in the United States Census: 1870-1940. “Journal of Interdisciplinary History” IX:1 (Summer, 1978) 111-130.

Anderson Conk, Margo. 1980. The US Census and Labor Force Change: a history of occupation statistics, 1870-1940. Yale University Press.

Anderson, Margo. 2002. Review of Christine E. Bose’s Women in 1900. Journal of Social History 36:2 (winter, 2002), 506-508.

Bose, Christine E. 2001. Women in 1900. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Couper, Mick P., and Frederick G. Conrad. 2001. Analysis of Occupation Coding in the Current Population Survey. Report for Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Edwards, Alba M. 1917. Social-Economic Groups of the United States. Journal of the American Statistical Association XV: 645-653.

Hunt, William C. 1909. The Federal Census of Occupations. Journal of the American Statistical Association.

Meyer, Peter B., and Anastasiya Osborne. 2005. Proposed Category System for 1960-2000 Census Occupations. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics working paper WP-383.

Meyer, Peter B. (Ed.) 2004. The Weeks Report database, 4th edition. Available online:

Meyer, Peter B. 2006. Updated unified category system for 1960-2000 Census occupations.

Roberts, Evan. 2007. Dissertation.

Sobek, Matthew. 1997. Dissertation summary. (A Century of Work: Gender, Labor Force Participation, and Occupational Attainment in the United States, 1880-1990) ()

Thorvaldsen, Gunnar. 2006. Away from Home in the Census. Historical Methods.

Weeks, Joseph D., (editor). 1884. Report on the Statistics of Wages in Manufacturing Industries, 1880 Census Vol. XX.

Wright, Carroll D., with William C. Hunt. 1900. History and Growth of the United States Census.

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[1] For their advice and encouragement I thank Margo Anderson, Nina Baur, Nele Bracke, J. David Hacker, Cindy Zoghi, and other participants at seminars at the ESSHC 2008 and RC33 2008 conferences. Views and conclusion in this paper are those of the author and do not reflect the views, policies, or official conclusions of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

[2] For example, one might wish to analyze changes over time in work activities, earnings distributions, licensing, union membership, education, or technological sophistication of the work force. In comparing a population of individuals, one might then wish to hold occupation constant and compare the individuals within occupations to one another over time. Another approach is to compare changes in each occupation over time, or to evaluate the changes in the distribution of occupation sizes. In any of these cases it is necessary to have some established category system of occupations which is comparable over time. The official Census definitions change every ten years however. These have been standardized over time in different ways by various efforts, but they do not address the changes in the boundary of who has an occupation, the definitional, scope and coverage changes addressed in this paper.

[3] I have not seen those results. doesn't seem to have them online; they standardized these early occupation results on the 1880 category system.

[4] shows the exact phrasing of these questions for telephone interviews for a recent CPS. has the questions asked for each past U.S. census.

[5] Anderson Conk (1980), p. 62.

[6] Anderson Conk, p. 16, and informal conversation with J. David Hacker. For more information I am advised to consult: Hacker again; Historical Statistics of the U.S., especially the section by Matthew Snipp; the work of Matthew Sobek of the Minnesota Population Center; and the census counting of Native Canadians documented by Michelle Hamilton.

[7] Informally Michelle Hamilton reports that the Canadian census enumerators were supposed to visit a dwelling three times before giving up on getting a report from that dwelling.

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