Measuring Professional and Employment Status in Surveys

This paper is focused on the measuring of employment and professional status in surveys. We analyzed the toolkit of eight sample surveys where questions about employment and professional status were present in the questionnaire, and found that in the current tradition of sample surveys questions about employment and profession are not “questions about facts”. The desire to combine questions leads to their complexity for the respondent and the need on his part not only to name his position, but also to choose between different identities of himself. Thus, it becomes more sensitive, which increases the potential bias. Also, the excessive complexity of the question may cause biases related to difficulties in answering by the respondent, which in a situation of a personal or telephone interview forces one to contact the interviewer, which inevitably leads to biases like “clarifying questions” from the respondent and “comments to the question” or even an “answer tip” by the interviewer. To minimize bias, it is proposed: to avoid “merging” two questions in one, to avoid response options with additional meaning in them (for example, gendered). Further quantitative studies can find out how the formulations of questions affect the final distribution of answers.