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Chapter 1.
Labor Force Data Derived from the Current Population
Survey
Collection Methods
Each month, during the calendar week containing the 19th day,
interviewers contact a “responsible” person in each of the sample
households in the CPS. At the time of the first enumeration of a
household, the interviewer visits the household and prepares a
roster of the household members, including their personal
characteristics (date of birth, sex, race, ethnic origin, marital
status, educational attainment, veteran status, and so on) and
their relationship to the person maintaining the household. The
interviewers enter this information into laptop computers. This
roster is then checked for accuracy and brought up to date at
each subsequent interview to take account of new or departed
residents, changes in marital status, and similar items. The
information on personal characteristics is thus available each
month for identification purposes and for cross-classification
with economic characteristics of the sample population.
Personal visits are preferred in the first month in which the
household is in the sample. In other months, the interview
generally is conducted by telephone. Approximately 70 percent of
the households in any given month are interviewed by telephone.
A portion of the households (10 percent) is interviewed via
computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI), from three
centralized telephone centers (located in Hagerstown, MD;
Jeffersonville, IN; and Tucson, AZ) by interviewers who also use
a computerized questionnaire.
At each monthly visit, a series of standard questions on labor
market activity during the preceding week is asked about each
household member 15 years of age and older. (As previously
mentioned, the official labor force estimates pertain to those
aged 16 and older.) The primary purpose of these questions is to
classify the sample population into the three basic economic
groups: The employed, the unemployed, and those not in the labor
force.
At the end of each day’s interviewing, the data collected are
transmitted to the Census Bureau’s central computer in
Washington, DC. Once files are transmitted to the main computer,
they are deleted from the laptops.
Because of the crucial role interviewers have in the household
survey, a great amount of time and effort is spent maintaining
the quality of their work. Interviewers are given intensive
training, including classroom lectures, discussion, practice,
observation, home-study materials, and on-the-job training. At
least once a year, they convene for daylong training and review
sessions, and, also at least once a year, they are accompanied by
a supervisor during a full day of interviewing to determine how
well they carry out their assignments.
A selected number of households are reinterviewed each month
to determine whether the information obtained in the first
interview was correct. The information gained from these
interviews is used to improve the entire training program.
Next: Estimation
Methods
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Bureau of Labor Statistics
