Field-Testing the Collection of New Data Elements in the Occupational Employment Statistics Survey

• Activity Number: 563
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 12, 2015 : 11:35 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Government Statistics Section
• Author(s): Carrie Jones* and Cori Martinelli
• Companies: Bureau of Labor Statistics and Bureau of Labor Statistics
• Keywords: Tenure ; Establishment survey ; Response rates ; payroll records ; labor turnover ; occupational demographics

Abstract

While there is great demand for detailed occupational information, such as employment and wages by gender, age, tenure, and turnover by occupation, this information has not previously been available from an establishment survey. The Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) survey conducted a test to see if employers were willing and able to report additional demographic information about employees, in addition to occupations and wages, which are already collected by OES. This new information could greatly expand the range of data products offered by OES. To determine if it was possible to uniformly collect extra data items and to assess the impact on regular OES data collection, the Bureau of Labor Statistics designed and conducted a three-wave field test. This paper will describe the field test and discuss the results and feasibility of collecting the new data items.