We all talk about employment and quote statistics on a regular basis, but few of us even imagine the complexity of the employment data out there or the substantial differences between sources.
Technically, “Employment” is the commitment of personal effort to the process of producing goods and services. In common usage, a person is said to be “Employed” if the person works for another person, a person is said to be “Self-employed” if the person works for him or herself, and a person is said to be “Unemployed” if the person has no job. This terminology works fine in most casual conversations but breaks down when dealing with data collection and maintenance efforts and utilizing data in analysis.
To maintain more precision and consistency, these terms are more tightly controlled in the official statistical process. Understanding the terms and the sources of data is important to understanding and correctly using the information the data provides. The link below is to a paper that provides definitions of terms and an understanding of data collection and content for major statistics on “Employment” in its most common contexts:
- Employment and unemployment rates for the residential labor force
- Employment by Industry
- Employment by occupation
- Employment by place of residence
- Employment by place of work
There are several sets of employment statistics available for any specified area. These might originate from multiple statistical agencies and refer to different measures of “Employment.” It is important to understand what the statistics are and what they tell us.
About 20 years ago, I wrote the original version of the linked narrative to assist students and researchers engaged in regional analysis work. Its first home was the Department of Economics website at Iowa State University. When I left the department in 2007, the document stagnated due to a lack of updates. It was eventually taken down. I recently stumbled across the original text and decided it would still serve a purpose if updated. Here is the update –