EWCS 2010 - Coding

The 5th EWCS included a few open questions, to record the respondents’ occupation and the economic activity of the organisation or company they work for. The answers were coded according to international classification systems for occupation (ISCO88 and ISCO08) and activity of companies and organisations (NACE Rev 1.1 and 2.0).

For both ISCO and NACE the answers were coded using both the current and the previous version of the classification system. The coding using the previous versions is needed to make comparisons with previous waves of the EWCS.

For the 5th EWCS, ISCO coding was carried out on the 4-digit level, allowing for very specific distinctions between occupations. One of the reasons for doing this was to enable an appropriate transition from the old ISCO classification to the most recent one.

These open questions were not the only ones to require coding. The question about the respondent’s level of education was recoded into ISCED categories, in order to make the country-specific education categories internationally comparable. Also, the income questions referred to the national currency in each country, which was afterwards converted into Euro according to the exchange rates at the time of conversion (01 March 2010).

For more information please see the Coding report [.pdf, 1MB].