Please click on a topic below to go directly to that topic, or browse this entire section.

Technical Information
     Sample Sizes
     Dates of Field Work
     Market Exchange Rates (no. of units=$1.00)
     Capital Cities

Sample Sizes

Total Czech sample (national sample plus Prague oversample): 5,621
Total Polish sample (national sample plus Warsaw oversample): [not yet available]

Dates of field work

Market exchange rates (no. of units = $1.00)

Capital cities

[In an effort to ensure cross-national standardization of procedures, two sets of instructions were sent to each country team in November 1992: "Instructions for Interviewers" and "Specifications Regarding Country-Specific Variables." These are shown here, in the following two sections. Inevitably, these instructions were not followed completely. Still, they provide the model of standardization toward which we were striving.]

Back to Top of Page

Instructions for interviewers

9 November 1992

Note that, as in the questionnaire, comments intended for country teams (e.g., requests that country-specific instructions to interviewers be written) are shown as here, in bold face italic.

Click on a topic below to go directly to that topic, or browse the section.

Coding conventions used in the questionnaire
Completing the Interview
Open-ended Responses
Household Roster
Education History Roster
Activity History Roster
Business History Roster
Political Difficulties
Income
Hours Worked Last Week
Father
Land Holding
Mother
Spouse
Respondent's Property
Residential History Roster

Coding Conventions Used in the Questionnaire

"Don't know" responses generally are coded 7 in one-digit fields and 97 in fields of two digits or more. This is the case for all of the display cards shown respondents.

"Refused" responses (the respondent explicitly refuses to answer) generally are coded 8 in one-digit fields and 98 in fields of two digits or more. This is the case for all of the display cards shown respondents.

"Not applicable" responses generally are coded 9 in on-digit fields and 99 in fields of two or more digits, in cases where the question actually is asked. Where the question is not asked, but is skipped over, the field is left blank.

These conventions are violated only in cases where following them would be confusing.

If these coding conventions differ from the usual way the survey organization handles don't know, refused, and not applicable responses, the organization's conventions may be substituted. However, the data must be recoded into the standard codes before sending them to UCLA.

Completing the interview

You will be given the name and address of a person to interview. The person to be interviewed will have been sent a letter saying that you are coming and asking for his or her cooperation. Please make three attempts to complete the interview. If the person is not available to be interviewed, try to make an appointment to come back at a specific time. If no one is at home, return at different times and different days of the week. If the respondent no longer lives at the listed address (someone else lives there, or the unit is vacant), ask the new occupants or neighbors whether they have a forwarding address for the respondent. Please give this to your supervisor. After each attempt to complete the interview, record the date, day of week, time, and disposition of the attempt. Country-specific instructions need to be written on where to record the disposition of interview attempts. Each data collection agency should create a file of dispositions of interview attempts, which includes for each attempt the date and time of day, the outcome, and whether the case was abandoned and a substitution made. A suggested file format is shown as Appendix A.

Country-specific instructions need to be written on how to complete an interview (it is urgently important to encourage interviewers to persevere and not to easily accept refusals), when to make a substitution, and the procedure for making a substitution. At minimum, three attempts should be made to complete an interview when the person is not at home or temporarily unavailable Of course, once it is clear that the interview cannot be completed (vacant house, wrong address, refusal, or the respondent is unable to be interviewed, due to illness, inability to speak the local language, etc., a substitution should be made.

Open-ended responses

At various points in the questionnaire, open-ended responses are required. Please try to get the respondent to be concrete and detailed. Short and general responses are not very helpful.

Rosters

If more lines are required for a roster than are shown, please record additional lines on a separate sheet and indicate at the bottom of the roster that it is continued on a separate sheet.

Household Roster

Definition of household. A household includes all the persons who (1) share a housing unit (house, apartment, mobile home, etc.); (2) share a common budget with respect to household expenditures; and (3) eat together. That is, we adopt the definition of a "collectively managing household" used in Eastern European housing and income statistics. Members of a household may consist of a single family, one person living alone, two or more families living together, or any other group of related or unrelated persons who share living arrangements, as defined above.

Education History Roster

1) What kind of education should be included?

The "Education History" roster should include all education the respondent had in his/her life, including education obtained by returning to school after a period of employment, military service, jail, etc. All schooling leading to a certificate or degree should be recorded, including Marxist-Leninist Party schools, but not short courses and on-the-job training. Incomplete schooling should be recorded as well as complete schooling.

2) What counts as separate spells of education? That is--when should a new row in the "Educational History" roster be used?

If any column changes, use a new line. Thus, to record a person beginning secondary school, leaving school for a year, and returning to the same secondary school, two lines would be used. Also, a person changing his or her major in a secondary or tertiary school would be recorded in two lines even though the school remained the same.

Also, each time a person changes actual schools, record a new line. Thus, a person whose family moved in the middle of primary school would be recorded in two lines even though the kind and type of school remained the same.

3) How do you tell type of school?

Country-specific instructions need to be included here. For example, in Hungary: 4-6 class elementary schools, 4 class primary schools and 8 class elementary schools would all be considered "elementary". In each country, it would be useful to prepare a list of current and former secondary and tertiary schools to avoid confusion. For example, in Hungary secondary schools include the National Ballet School, etc. A country-specific instruction for identifying vocational schools should be written, e.g., in Hungary vocational schools are those that have "vocational" in their names.

For tertiary institutions, please record the exact name and locality of the school in the last column of the table, e.g., in Hungary, "Karl Marx University of Economics, Budapest".

4) Class or Grade Level Completed

Count the number of classes or years completed, where completion implies that the respondent is eligible to continue to the next class. If the respondent had to repeat a class, the number of years spent in the school will be higher than the number of classes completed. Record the class completed, even if the respondent dropped out of school without completing the school. For example, a respondent who had eight years of primary school and then attended an academic secondary school for one year, leaving without a degree, would be recorded in two lines. The first line would show his primary school education, with "level 8" recorded for the "educational level attained"; the second line would show his academic secondary school education, with "secondary class 1" shown as the educational level attained. Note that the level of detail recorded for "Education level completed" depends on the detail included in the country-specific code for educational attainment. These instructions may need to be modified accordingly.

Activity History Roster

1) When to change lines

Start a new line if there is a change in any column. That is, record not only changes of employers but also promotions or job transfers within firms, a change from full time to part time work, etc. Job transfers and promotions are particularly difficult to discover; probe to ensure that the respondent tells you about all such changes.

Record all activities, beginning when the respondent left school or, if he/she left and then returned to school, when he/she left school for the first time. Count all activities that last at least four months; therefore, do not count summer jobs between school terms. However, if the respondent interrupted his or her wage-earning activity for at least four months, e.g., due to unemployment, maternity leave, travel abroad, a jail term, etc., record that period on a separate line.

Every month of every year must be accounted for, from the time the respondent first left school until now. If an activity lasted less than four months, include it with the previous activity. For example, a respondent who finished secondary school in June 1985; took a job that lasted until May 1986, then went to visit his relatives in America in June through August 1986; entered university in September 1986 and graduated in June 1990; then took a job at which he still works would be shown in the first three lines of the Activity History roster as:

2) Kind of activity

When you ask about kind of activity, show Card B. If the respondent says that he/she was both working and doing something else, code 01, "Working"; except, if the response is 08 through 11 ("Military" through "Concentration camp"), code these categories. If the response is 13 ("Other"), write the response in the margin of the table, together with the line number. Record the year (last two digits) and month when the activity started (see below).

Helping family members should be recorded as working (code 01). This category will apply principally to those engaged in agriculture or in small businesses.

If working (Activity code 01), ask d through j. Otherwise ask what the respondent did next; that is, repeat the activity question.

3) Date of start

Be sure to code the year (last 2 digits) and month the activity began, not when the previous activity ended. If the respondent has trouble remembering the month, don't let him/her take too much time trying to remember; encourage him/her to say "don't know" and move on. The months we are particularly interested in are for the most recent years, from 1988 until the present. Prior to 1988, getting the exact month is not as important.

4) Occupation

Be sure to record this and all occupation questions in as much detail as possible. Do not use one or two word terms such as teacher, laborer, factory worker, sales clerk, office worker, manager. Rather, describe the actual job title and kind of work, e.g., "Teacher in a primary school," "Teacher of Marxism/Leninism in secondary school," "Mathematics teacher in an academic secondary school," "Construction laborer--carries bricks to mason," "Factory worker--operates drill press in automobile factory," "Sales clerk--sells shoes in department store," "Office clerk--types and files correspondence," "Financial clerk--figures cost estimates for construction projects," "Manager of private restaurant," "Manager of collective farm," etc.

If the respondent says he had more than one occupation at the same time, ask for the "main job." The main job is the official job if there was one; otherwise, it is the job at which the respondent spent the most time.

5) "Industrial branch" and "Organization type".

If the response is "Other", record the specifics in the margin of the table, together with the line number.

6) Self-employment

If it is obvious from previous responses that the respondent is self-employed, simply record this and continue. If it is not absolutely obvious, ask.

7) Number of supervisees

If the respondent asks whether to count only those directly supervised, or the people they supervise as well, say to count all those directly or indirectly supervised. Note: teachers should not be regarded as supervising pupils; social workers should not be regarded as supervising clients; etc. If the respondent says he/she supervised a variable number of people during the time in the job, ask for the largest number ever supervised in that job.

8) City or town where worked

Be sure to record all administrative levels--province, district, and city or town. If a village or rural area, record the town or district in which the village is located; do not record each separate village. But do specify that it is a village: "village in x town" or "rural area near x town," so that we can distinguish townsfolk from villagers. If the respondent worked in a foreign country, simply record the name of the country. If the respondent says he worked in no fixed place (e.g., a long distance truck driver), record the home base locality. If he insists there was no home base, record "variable locations".

Note that if the location of the job changes, the job is regarded as changing and separate lines should be used (except, of course, in the case of long distance truck drivers, etc.).

8) It is crucial to record the present or most recent occupation.

Repeat D2, a through j, until all jobs or other activities are accounted for up to the present one. It is extremelyimportant to get information on the present or most recent job. If the respondent wants to break off the history, say: Well, can you at least tell me about the job you are doing now or, if you are not working, the job you did most recently? Then ask a through j for this job.

Business History Roster

Check the Activity History roster to determine whether the respondent has been self-employed any time from January 1988 to the present (as indicated by code 1 in column g). If so, ask the questions in Section E; if not, go to Section F. Record answers to Section E in the "Business History" table. Ask E1, a through f, for each line in the activity history, from January 1988 to the present, in which the respondent was self-employed.

Note that to identify the activity in which the respondent was engaged in January, 1988, you will need to search for the last date prior to January 1988, since the dates indicate the start of an activity.

When mentioning the line number of the Activity History roster, give enough detail to be sure you and the respondent are talking about the same activity.

Political difficulties (F1e, F2e)

Encourage the respondent to give as much detail as possible, and to be very concrete. "Was a dissident", "was religious" etc., are unacceptable answers. Instead, report concrete details, e.g., "Was told in 1952 that I would be removed from my job as a village school teacher unless I stopped going to church on Sundays. Continued to go to church and was fired at the end of the school term."

Income

For I1, I2, and I4, if the respondent is reluctant to give an answer, or has difficulty calculating an amount, encourage a guess. Say, "just give me your best guess," or, if that doesn't work, "just give me the approximate amount."

Ask about annual income. But if the respondent says he/she prefers to report monthly income, that is acceptable. Be sure to report whether the income reported is annual or monthly.

If the respondent says he/she has no spouse/partner, skip I2.

Hours worked last week (I8)

If the respondent says there were special circumstances (holiday, illness, personal leave, etc.), that made last week atypical, ask how many hours he/she usually works per week.

Father

Questions J2 through J9 are to be asked about the natural father, except if the respondent answered "03" to J1, in which case the questions in this section are to be asked about the stepfather.

J5-J9. See instructions for Activity History above.

Land holding (K2b, L4b, N4b, P2)

Country-specific instructions need to be written here regarding how to handle different units of measure. See the note in the memo on "Country-specific Modifications..."

If the respondent does not know the exact size of the land holdings, ask the next question: whether the holdings were small, medium, or large.

Mother

Questions M1 through M8 are to be asked about the natural mother, except if the respondent answered "02" to J1, in which case the questions in this section are to be asked about the stepmother.

M4-M8. See instructions for Activity History above.

Spouse

O4, O6. See instructions for Activity History above.

O6a. If respondent says that spouse had no father or never knew his/her father, code 99 and skip to P1.

Respondent's property

P7, P9, P11, P12. Value of property. If the respondent does not seem to know, or is reluctant to reveal, the exact worth, encourage a guess or an approximate figure.

P7. Include here the respondent's residence, weekend house or cottage, other residential property, and also any business property. Do not include agricultural land holdings.

Residential History Roster

The logic of the residential history roster is to start with where the respondent was living at age 14, to record the "residential status" of his/her family there, and then to record each time the respondent changed eitherresidential status or locality. The locality where the respondent currently lives should be the last line of the table, and this line should record his/her current residential status and the year he/she last changed residential status. Consider, for an example, a respondent who was born in 1940. Suppose he was living at age 14 with his family in a house they owned; moved to a worker's hostel in the same city at age 18 (in 1958); moved to a different city in 1964 to an apartment he rented from the local council; moved in 1968 to another apartment in the same city, also owned by the local council; and bought his own apartment in that city in 1975, where he has lived ever since. We would record him in the Residential History roster as:

Note that we would not record the 1968 move, since neither the residential status nor the locality (city or town) changed, even though the respondent changed apartments.

If the respondent lived simultaneously in two places, e.g., because he worked in one place and his family lived in another and he slept in the city where he worked several nights a week and with his family several nights a week, code the place where he/she usually stayed at least four nights a week.

Do not record moves that lasted less than six months. Each new move recorded should be to place where the respondent stayed at least six months.

If the respondent spent more than six months wandering from place to place, record the beginning year of this period of wandering and specify "various locations" for Name of Place and "other" for Residential Status.

Year of move

Code last 2 digits of year.

Name of place

Be sure to record all administrative levels--province, district, and city or town; for foreign countries, record only the country. If the locality a village or rural area, record the town or district in which the village is located; do not record each separate village.But do specify that it is a village: "village in x town" or "rural area near x town," so that we can distinguish townsfolk from villagers. Modify the instructions for each country as necessary to fit the local definitions of the various administrative levels.

Residential status

For those still living with their parents, record the "residential status" of the parents.

Housing Situation

Questions that refer to this <apartment/house> are intended to refer to the "housing unit" in which the respondent lives. A housing unit is a house, an apartment, a mobile home, a group of rooms, or a single room that is occupied as separate living quarters. Separate living quarters are those which have direct access from the outside of the building or through a common hall. A housing unit may be occupied by more than one "household". See the definition of a household above, under "Household Roster". There may be many housing units in an apartment building, and a house may be divided into two or more housing units, but we are interested only in the housing unit occupied by the respondent, whether or not it is shared with another household.

Number of rooms. Country-specific specifications of which rooms to count need to be written.

Size of <house/apartment>. Again, country-specifications need to be written on how to count the floor space.

Life Style

If the respondent is not sure how frequently his/her parents did various things, how many books there were, etc., encourage a guess rather than easily accepting "don't know" responses.

Party History roster

Record the name of each party in sufficient detail to enable us to distinguish one party from another. Also, record the name of offices as concretely and specifically as possible. This instruction will need to be modified if you use pre-coded response categories.

Record all parties the respondent ever joined. If he/she left a party and rejoined it, count that as two separate parties. If the respondent held more than one office, record the highest office held. Continue until respondent says he/she joined no other parties.

Ancestry

In Czechoslovakia and Russia, it is acceptable to change the wording of the introduction and V3 by omitting the phrase "In addition to being...", since in these two countries there are members of ethnic minorities who do not consider themselves "Czech" or "Slovak" or "Russian".

Conclusion

W3. Please record the respondent's comments in as much detail as possible. Use additional pages as necessary. If you do use additional pages, write "continued" at the bottom of the space for W3.

Back to Top of Page

                                                          Substitution
     54                          9                     Respondent identification number of substitute (from Population Register)

Back to Top of Page

Specifications regarding country-specific variables

[These instructions were sent to country teams in November 1992.]

12 November 1992

TO: Country Teams

FROM: Treiman and Szelenyi

RE: Country-specific modifications to the general population questionnaire and notes to Country Teams

At several points in the questionnaire, we specified that country-specific codes need to be devised, and, in a few places, that country-specific modifications to the questions are appropriate. Apart from these specifically identified modifications, no other modifications should be made, since to do so would violate the principle that we conduct a common study with a common questionnaire. If any of you feels that items not explicitly mentioned here must be modified in your country, please seek the approval of Treiman and Szelenyi in advance; we--and your colleagues from the other countries--will be very unhappy if you present us with a fait accompli.

Recall, also, our agreement that country-specific additions to the questionnaire must be added at the end. If you wish to include any additional questions in the body of the questionnaire, again please seek the approval of Treiman and Szelenyi in advance.

We believe that requiring that all modifications of the common questionnaire flow through us, and are made only with our explicit approval, is the best way to guarantee the genuine comparability of our data across all countries. We thank you for your cooperation.

Documentation required

In addition to the data files, each country team is expected to provide documentation on (a) the sample design; (b) the field work experience, including data on the disposition of attempts to complete interviews, the completion rate and distribution of categories of non-completion, special problems, etc.; (c) a copy of the native language questionnaire; and (d) details on country-specific codes.

General suggestions:

(1) Show cards. Since there are 16 show cards, you may wish to produce them in a booklet rather than separately, to make handling them easier.

(2) Frequently used codes. Codes used in many questions (e.g., highest eduction attained) might be printed on a foldout sheet attached to each questionnaire, so that it always appears as a third page as the interviewer turns the pages of the questionnaire booklet.

(3) Booklet format. We recommend that questionnaires be printed as a booklet, using both sides of the page. This will cut down on its bulk and make it less likely to be off-putting to respondents.

(4) Advance letter. We recommend that letters be sent to respondents in advance, describing the study and asking for cooperation. We believe that a carefully worded letter, stressing that ours is an academic study involving data collection in five countries and the cooperation of researchers from both the East and the West, and with a prestigious letterhead and/or signature, will substantially reduce the refusal rate. This is particularly important for the elite sample, but is important for the general population sample as well, since refusal rates are rapidly increasing in urban areas of all our countries.

Coding conventions used in the questionnaire

"Don't know" responses generally are coded 7 in one-digit fields and 97 in fields of two digits or more. This is the case for all of the display cards shown respondents.

"Refused" responses (the respondent explicitly refuses to answer) generally are coded 8 in one-digit fields and 98 in fields of two digits or more. This is the case for all of the display cards shown respondents.

"Not applicable" responses generally are coded 9 in on-digit fields and 99 in fields of two or more digits, in cases where the question actually is asked. Where the question is not asked, but is skipped over, the field is left blank.

These conventions are violated only in cases where following them would be confusing.

If these coding conventions differ from the usual way the survey organization handles don't know, refused, and not applicable responses, the organization's conventions may be substituted. However, the data must be recoded into the standard codes before sending them to UCLA.

Open-ended responses and "Other (specify)" responses

There are three situations where coding is required:

1) Where narrative responses must be coded into a standard classification. In our questionnaire, the variables in this category are (with the maximum number of variables for which space is provided shown in parentheses; usually there will be many fewer variables to be coded):
                                  --Occupation (32 variables)
                                  --Geographical place (36 variables)
                                  --Name and location of tertiary institution (10 variables)
                                  --Languages spoken (4 variables)
                                  --Political party (24 variables)

For occupation there is a standard classification, the 1988 International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO), to which we plan to add some categories to capture distinctions among managerial occupations.

Presumably, classifications for geography already exist in each country, developed by the Central Statistical Office. We have allowed 9 columns per place, on the assumption that country classifications may hierarchical and required more than one variable (e.g., separate variables for province or region, district, and city or town). (Recall our agreement not to code each village, but rather to code regions and districts and within districts to explicitly code each city and town, together with a specification that the respondent lives either in the city or town or in a village attached to a city or town.)

Both the occupation coding and the geographic coding can be done either in the conventional way or via computer-assisted procedures outlined in an accompanying memo.

With respect to the remaining three sets of variables (tertiary institutions, languages, and political parties) we urge you to consider converting these to pre-coded questions. You should elicit the required information by asking the questions exactly as specified in the questionnaire, but you may want to develop a list of response categories, together with an "other (specify)" option in each case, and ask the interviewers to record the appropriate code rather than writing out the verbatim response. Obviously, whether you develop a set of categories in advance depends on your judgment as to whether you can develop an adequate list in advance. But if you can do so, it certainly will cut down on coding costs.

2) Where response categories include an "other (specify)" option. The affected variables are "Relation to respondent" (Household Roster), "Kind of school" and "Major or specialization" (Education History roster); "Activity," "Industrial branch," and "Organization type" (Activity History roster and other places); "Kind of side business" and "Type of side job" (Part-time Economic Activity roster); H3; H4; J1; "Residential status" (Residential History roster); U6; U8; U16-U17; V1-V3; V4; (also, tertiary institutions, languages, and political parties [for the party history questions], if you develop pre-coded categories for these variables). In these cases you should add codes as necessary (please be sure to send a list of added codes to UCLA!) and provide numerical codes in the data set sent to UCLA. We do not regard as a problem the fact that the meaning of given codes will vary by country, since this situation is exactly the same as for those variables that have country- specific response categories. Where applicable, we will create new variables with standardized codes as part of the data preparation process at UCLA.

3) Genuinely open-ended questions. There are only three of these in the questionnaire: F1e, F2e, and W3. In order to give all of us access to each of these responses, we propose that they be translated into English and that the English translation be provided as a separate document, which includes the respondent id number, the variable number, and the narrative response. We do not think this will be unduly onerous since it is likely that there will be responses only from a small fraction of respondents.

Note that for each of these three variables, a 3 column field is reserved in the file (see the "File Map" memo). This was done to allow country teams to code the responses if you wish to do so. At minimum, you should include a flag in the file indicating that there is some sort of narrative response. That is, if you do not code the responses, please enter, in the right hand column of the field for each variable, the following:

                                                     1 There is a narrative response
                                                     2 There is not a narrative response

Cover sheet

Country-specific procedures are appropriate here, since each survey house will have its own way of organizing this information. Minimally, record the small geographic area (census track or comparable unit) of the respondent's address; the identity of the interviewer; the language in which in the interview was conducted (if interviewers are conducted in more than one language in your country), and the amount of time required for the interview. In addition, record whatever information is necessary to verify the interview, e.g., name and address of interviewee.

Introduction

Each country team should devise an appropriate introduction, along the lines of that shown on p. 1 of the questionnaire.

Selecting a respondent within the household

It now appears that all countries will draw samples from the population register. Thus, it will not be necessary to select persons within households. If any country does resort to a household sample, it will be necessary to modify the data collection procedure slightly in that country, by adding a cover sheet in which all eligible persons (household members age 20-69) are listed and a Kish table procedure used to select the individual to be interviewed. The selected individual should then be administered the entire questionnaire, starting with A1.

Highest level of education attained

Identical codes for educational attainment should be used throughout the questionnaire, with the exception of father's father's education and mother's father's education, for which we have devised grosser categories to overcome lack of information.

Country-specific educational attainment codes must be devised. However, they must be convertible into years of school completed and also into a modified version of the M ller/CASMIN educational classification [Müller, Walter, Paul Lüttinger, Wolfgang König, and Wolfgang Karle. 1990. "Class and Education in Industrial Nations." Pp. 61-91 in Class Structure in Europe, edited by Max Haller. Armonk, NY: Sharpe.]. The modified CASMIN categories are:

01      Incomplete primary education
02      Completed primary education
03      Completed primary education and basic vocational qualification
04      Secondary, incomplete, no certificate 05 Secondary, vocational qualification
06      Secondary, academic certificate (e.g., matura)
07      Higher education, incomplete, no certificate/degree
08      Higher education, tertiary certificate/degree
09      Higher education, post-graduate study
97      Don't know
98      Refused

Kind of school

The list below may be expanded with country-specific categories, so long as it can be collapsed back to the listed categories. When designing the country-specific categories, keep in mind that we need to be able to distinguish party and komsomol colleges and training programs from other educational institutions, and also that it would be desirable to separately identify special schools for gifted children (and the children of nomenklatura officials), and special schools for handicapped children.

01      Primary
02      Academic secondary school
03      Vocational/technical secondary school
04      Apprentice training
05      College/Institute
06      University
07      Other higher educational institution (specify)
08      Other (specify)
97      Don't know
98      Refused

Type of school

However, there is some possibility to get money from my Institute. I mean that my Center would be released from charging the survey with overhead and we receive some credit for coding the data.The list below may be expanded with country-specific codes, so long as the expanded list can be collapsed back to these categories.

1      Regular, day school
2      Evening, night school
3      Correspondence school
7      Don't know
8      Refused

Major or specialization

The list below may be expanded with country-specific categories, so long as it can be collapsed back to the listed categories.

01      General, no specialization
02      Engineering/construction/technical
03      Agriculture/forestry
04      Business/management
05      Economics
06      Public administration
07      Military/police
08      Law
09      Medicine/Dentistry
10      Other health
11      Sport
12      Education
13      Natural science (e.g., Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry,
              Geology, Materials Science, Meteorology, Mathematics, Physics)
14      Social science (e.g., Anthropology, Geography, Political
              Science, Psychology, Sociology)
15      Humanities/art (e.g., Art, Art History, Classics, Literature, Linguistics, Music, Philosophy, Religion)
16      Marxism/Leninism
17      Other (specify)
97      Don't know
98      Refused

Occupation

All occupation reports must be coded into a modified version of the 1988 ISCO classification (International Labor Office, 1990). The modification, to be provided from UCLA, will make additional distinctions among administrative occupations, which are particularly important for our research--particularly for the elite study.

Please devise interviewer training procedures to ensure that all occupation questions are recorded in as much detail as possible. Instruct interviewers not to use one or two word terms such as teacher, laborer, factory worker, sales clerk, office worker, manager. Rather, describe the actual job title and kind of work, e.g., "Teacher in a primary school," "Teacher of Marxism/Leninism in a provincial university," "Mathematics teacher in an academic secondary school," "Construction laborer--carries bricks to mason," "Factory worker-- operates drill press in automobile factory," "Sales clerk--sells shoes in department store," "Office clerk--types and files correspondence," "Financial clerk--figures cost estimates for construction projects," "Manager of private restaurant," "Manager of collective farm," etc.

Since there will be as many as 160,000 occupation codes to assign in the General Population survey (= 5,000 respondents * 32 occupations per respondent), we recommend that you consider computer-assisted procedures for carrying out the coding of occupations (and also for assigning geographical place codes, for work place and place of residence). Computer-assisted coding requires that the material to be coded be keyed into a computer file. See the 5 November 1992 memo, "Computer-assisted coding of occupations...".

If you wish to code occupations into a national classification as well as into the ISCO88 classification (which we would discourage, since it will double the cost of the occupation coding), please append the country-specific codes to the end of the file. We assume that the ISCO codes will appear at the locations designated in the File Map.

Size of farm/land holdings (E1f, E2f, K2b, L4b, N4b, P2)

If appropriate, please code the size of holdings in hectares. However, if hectares are not appropriate, country- specific units are acceptable as an alternative. Whatever unit of measure is used in a country should be used for all responses in that country. If it is necessary to allow respondents to use a variety of units of measure, please convert these to a single standard during the editing process, since we have allowed room in the file map for only a single unit. Also, if a unit of measure other than hectares is used, please send a note to UCLA specifying the formula for converting the country-specific unit to hectares.

Income (I1-I4)

Record income in local currency.

Countries with hyper-inflation (e.g., Russia) may wish to rephrase the income questions to refer to the past month. This is acceptable.

Dates for father's and mother's occupation and for property holding (J6-J9, K2-K6, L4-L8, M5-M8, N4-N8).

The dates shown in the questionnaire are appropriate for Hungary. In particular, 1948 is chosen to represent the period at the beginning of the Communist era before substantial expropriation took place; and 1952 is chosen to represent the height of the Stalinist period. 1963 and 1973 capture changes in the social system, and also conform to years in which the Hungarian Social Mobility Survey was conducted. If other dates are more appropriate for other countries, they may be substituted. However, all else equal, it is better to retain the same dates in all countries. So we urge substitution of other dates only when there is a clear reason for doing so.

Land redistribution

P16 may be omitted or modified as necessary--omitted if there was no land reform from which respondents and their families would have received property and modified if a date other than 1945 is more appropriate.

Compensation

P17 may be omitted if it is irrelevant to a particular country because there has been no property restitution.

Dates for trade union membership

The date for U5 may be modified or an additional year added, if necessary (e.g., in Poland). If an extra year is added, the variable(s) will need to be added to the end of the file, so as to preserve the uniformity of the data files across countries.

Unions (U6, U8)

Country-specific lists need to be devised. Be sure to include an "other (specify)" category.

Current political parties (U16, U17, Card M)

Country-specific lists need to be devised. Be sure to include an "other (specify)" category. If elections were conducted in two rounds, ask about the second round. In the Russian case, since there were no parties in the last election the question might be rephrased in terms of support for various candidates.

Ancestry (V1-V3, Card N)

Country-specific lists need to be devised. Be sure to include an "other (specify)" category. Also, all countries should include "Jewish" as a separate ancestry. The following is the Hungarian list, as an example:

German
Slovak
Jewish
Romanian
Serbian
Croat
Gypsy
Ukrainian
Other (specify)_______________________________________

Religion (V4, Card O)

Country-specific lists need to be devised. Be sure to include an "other (specify)" category. Also, all countries should include "Jewish" as a separate ancestry. The following is the Hungarian list, as an example:

No religious upbringing
Roman Catholic
Calvinist
Lutheran
Jewish
Other (specify)_______________________________________

A cautionary note regarding the keying of the Income Roster data (I1 and I2)

Note that, unlike all other questions in questionnaire, responses to I1 and I2 are not recorded across all columns in each row before moving to the next row. Rather, the order in which the questions are asked, recorded, and ordered in the File Map is (1,1),(1,2),(2,1),(2,2),(3,1),(3,2),(4,1),(4,2),(1,3),(1,4), (2,3),(2,4),(3,3),(3,4),(4,3),(4,4), where the first number of each pair refers to the row and the second number to the column. Be sure to properly instruct key operators to avoid confusion.

More generally, you will want to carefully instruct key operators on how to key the roster data, or program the key entry program if you use one, to make sure that the key entry operator skips to the end of the roster when the last entry in the roster is encountered.

* * * [This completes the November, 1992, memoranda.]

Back to Top of Page

Specifications to achieve fully comparable data sets

1. Age restriction. Our design specified that each sample be a probability sample of the population age 20-69. In two countries this specification was not followed. In Hungary, interviews were conducted with persons age 18 and older. In Russia, interviews were conducted with persons age 20-79. Thus, to achieve fully comparable samples, it is necessary to select persons age 20-69. We recommend that respondents be selected who were born between 1923 and 1973 inclusively. This results in minor sloppiness around the edges; that is, some persons age 19 and age 70 could have been included in the sample. Given that we do not have month of birth, there is nothing we can do about this.

2. Weighting. In order to achieve fully comparable national probability samples of the adult population of each country, we have constructed a WEIGHT variable, which is actually the product of seven specific weight variables designed to correct for various departures from representativeness. With the exception of WT1, which excludes persons less than 20 and older than 69, each weight (and hence the total weight as well) is designed to preserve the original sample size. That is, the sum of each weight variable is equal to the original sample size (persons age 20-69) in each country. In order to take account of intercorrelations among variables used to create the weights, the weights were constructed in sequence. Thus, each weight was created using as input the weighted sample as defined by the product of the previous weights. Here we describe the concepts used in effecting the weighting. The exact procedures are shown in the SPSS command file WEIGHT.INC in Appendix D.

a) WT1. Age restriction. As specified above, we have defined the adult population as those age 20-69. While we have distinguished the within-range sample from the out-of-range sample for Hungary and Russia with different response codes in the variable COUNTRY, the following weight variable, as a component of the overall weight variable, also restricts the sample to those age 20-69, and by so doing removes a few cases from the remaining countries falling outside the range 20-69, or for whom information on date of birth is missing. WT1 = 1 for those for whom BIRTH is greater than or equal to 23 and less than or equal to 73, and = 0 otherwise.

b) WT2. Prague over-sample. In the Czech Republic, Prague was deliberately over-sampled with the intention of creating a special Prague sample of 1,500 cases, of interest to urban geographers; in fact, a sample of 1,449 completed interviews was achieved for Prague. The oversampling was accomplished by drawing two separate samples: a probability sample of the entire country, including Prague (N = 4,737, of which 563 cases are from Prague and 4,174 are from the remainder of the country) and a special supplementary sample for Prague (N = 884). Rather than omitting the supplementary sample from the analysis, we have included them and have weighted all cases from Prague (from both the probability and supplementary samples) by .462 and all cases from the remainder of the Czech Republic by 1.187. These weights reproduce the original sample size from the combined Czech samples and also the distribution of cases between Prague and the remainder of the country as in the national sample. All cases in the remaining countries are given weights of 1 on WT2.

c) WT3. Size of place of residence. All of the samples are multi-stage probability samples, with the first stage(s) consisting of geographical regions (district, cities and towns, etc.). Hence, in principle they should be fully representative of the population with respect to geographical location. However, differential response rates (lower response rates in the capital city and sometimes in other cities) distorted the sample in some countries. Where differences between observed and expected percentages in places of various sizes were small (less than one per cent on average) we made no adjustments but simply specified WT2 = 1. This was the case in Hungary. In the remaining countries, we have weighted the data by size of place so that they correspond to the population distribution as indicated in the most recent census while preserving the sample sizes prior to weighting.

d) WT4. Household samples. In the Czech Republic and Russia, a probability sample of households was chosen and then an adult in the household was chosen at random. To convert the household sample into a person sample, we weighted the data for each of these two countries by the number of adults in the household divided by the mean number of adults (where "adults" are persons eligible to be interviewed--that is, persons age 20-69). These means are 1.98 and 2.21, for the Czech Republic and Russia, respectively. For all countries except the Czech Republic and Russia, WT4 = 1.

e) WT5. Gender bias. This corrects for bias in gender distribution. These corrections are likely to be slightly conservative, since the available census data pertain to the entire population, and thus include persons older than 69, who are disproportionately female. No correction has been made for Bulgaria since the necessary information is not yet available; it is unlikely that there is much gender bias in the Bulgarian data since in the weighted sample males constitute 48.1 per cent, which is consistent with the population percentages in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia. No corrections have been made for Hungary or Slovakia since the census and weighted survey distributions are very close--within about one half of one per cent.

f) WT6. Education bias. This corrects for bias in education distributions. A variety of adjustments were made to take account of the fact that, with the exception of the Czech Republic, the census educational distributions available at the time the weights were constructed do not fully correspond to our sample specification, particularly with respect to age--a critical variable given the secular increase in education in all of these societies. These are reported in detail in WEIGHT.INC in Appendix D.

g) WT7. Corrections for design effects. Since all of our samples are multi-stage probability samples, they all have some loss of efficiency relative to simple random samples. It is our intention to introduce a constant weight in each country to take account of the "design effect," the loss of efficiency due to clustering. However, the information necessary to accomplish this is not yet available. Hence, for the present WT7 = 1 for all respondents.

g) WEIGHT. The overall weight variable, WEIGHT, is created as the product of weight variables 1-7. In all analyses of the population age 20-69 the command WEIGHT BY WEIGHT should always precede the analysis to ensure that the sample data are adequately representative of the population of each country.

Back to Top of Page

For problems with this page, please e-mail libbie@ucla.edu.

Return to SSEE Home.