M. Belloni & K. Tijdens (2019). Occupation > industry predictions for measuring industry in surveys, AIAS-HSI Working Paper 5

Many questionnaires have a question “Please write the main business activity of the organisation where you work”. The answer is commonly asked as an open text field, challenging the survey holder to code the response into an industry classification. Alternatively, in a web-survey respondents can self-identify their industry from a database. Task 8.4 in SERISS includes two deliverables, D8.10 and D8.11. For D8.10 a database of 321 industry names was developed and translated for use in 99 countries, all coded in 3- or 4-digits according to the classification NACE Rev. 2. The database facilitates survey respondents to self-identify their industry from this lookup table by either an autosuggest box or a two-level search tree. Concerning D8.11, the WageIndicator web survey shows that respondents tend to skip the question about industry relatively more often compared to other questions, presumably because they judge answering the question as cognitively too demanding. Therefore, for D8.11 an occupation>industry prediction has been developed, providing survey respondents with a limited set of industries, most likely for their occupation. Of course, the limited list of industries, shown to the respondent, always includes an option ‘other’, with the full look-up table shown in the next step.