A very good summary from Mr. Purvis, I would like to add one thing. The class of worker allows for only one response. If a worker has both a wage job and a self-employed job, he has to choose. I usually interpret the self-employed data from the Class of worker as an estimate of the people whose primary job is self-employment. The class of worker question probably misses the self-employment jobs that are occasional or part-time. However, when the PUMS data comes out, the field under source of income for self-employment could be used to estimate the part-time or occasional self-employment. Dave Abrams Mid-Region Council of Governments of New Mexico -----Original Message----- From: Chuck Purvis [mailto:CPurvis(a)mtc.ca.gov] Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2003 12:32 PM To: ctpp-news(a)chrispy.net Subject: RE: [CTPP] Reconciling Total Employment and Workers-at-Work 1. Census 2000, summary file #3, Table P51 provides data on workers by class of worker, including the self-employed and unpaid family. This shows that 10.1 percent of U.S. workers are self-employed or unpaid family; 11.6 percent in California; and 10.6 percent in the Bay Area. Interestingly our self-employed share ranges upwards to 23.2 percent of the employed labor force in Marin County (home of George Lucas and other self-employed clones). So, counties with high self-employed shares are probably either agrarian economies or entrepeneurial economies. 2. The more I research, the less I find out I really know. There are several sources of data on employment, including the BLS, BEA and Census. One very good source of information is the book "Socioeconomic Data for Understanding Your Regional Economy" by Cortright and Reamer. It is available on their EDA-supported web site at: www.econdata.net Check it out. 3. Imputation (or allocation, using the Census Bureau's terminology) will definitely be an error issue for place-of-work or other partial responses, though if the census respondent said "no" to all of the employment-related questions, then it's fairly certain that the Bureau couldn't change those answers (whether the answers are correct or not.) I don't know what happens if a person reported their place-of-work and means of transportation but didn't report other employment-related questions (industry, occupation) (probably those values are imputed/allocated). Definitely we will be seeing these "allocation flags" in PUMS as well as other census data products.... And we shouldn't forget sampling error (decennial census long form is still only a 1-in-6 survey); as well as non-standard errors (persons not telling the truth! egads!) Chuck Why would the census be missing the folks who--I agree--are missed in ES202? The self-employed, public workers, etc. should still be covered just fine in the census--as well as anyone else. Re non-response: you'd e surprised what they can impute! Patty Becker At 09:18 AM 03/18/2003 -0500, you wrote: