Methodology description of the labour force sample survey                  
FRANCE 1997

Enquête sur l’emploi, 1997

INSEE, Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Économiques

Direction générale
18, boulevard Adolphe Pinard
75675 Paris cedex 14
Phone: +34 – 41175050
Fax: +34 - 41176666

a) geographical: metropolitan France (continental France + Corse) – excluding overseas territories (Antilles-Guyane, Guadeloupe, Guyane, Martinique, Réunion)
b) persons covered: private households + those individuals living in communities who are member of a private household (who have a link with a private household). Only the individuals aged 15 (the individuals should be 15 during the year the survey refers to) and more are interviewed.

Included are:

• conscripts;
• regular soldiers and serving airmen living in barracks or in camp;
• cadets;
• students living in halls of residence or hostels;
• workers living in hostels;
• prisoners living in prison;
• patients in hospitals, psychiatric hospitals and nursing homes;
• individuals living in old people’s homes;
• workers living in lumber camps and building yards;
• patients in sanatorium.

Excluded are:

• hospital personnel, school personnel and hotel staff living in communities;
• members of religious communities;
• individuals living in mobile houses;
• bargees.

The Survey is carried out once a year, in March (in 1982, 1975, and 1968 a little bit later; in 1990 a little bit earlier). In the period 1977-1981 the Survey has been carried out twice a year (March and October).
The interviews are distributed over 4 weeks.

The week before the survey (last week from Monday morning until Sunday night before the survey).

The French Labour Force Survey – carried out in March every year by interviewing about 75,000 households – completes the other information sources about employment and unemployment and improve the knowledge of the evolution of the labour market in between the two censuses.

 

The Labour Force Survey allows classification of employment, unemployment and inactivity according to the criteria defined by the International Labour Office, as well as of intermediate situations that develop "at the fringe" of the standard categories.

Active population: employed (active population with a job) + unemployed

 

Employed: the individuals with a job (employed) are those who declare having an occupation when answering this question: "Which is your current occupation?". Those who answer not being at work are asked whether they worked during the week before the survey. Are considered to be employed:
- those who worked at least one hour;
- those who – having already worked in their current job – were absent in the reference week, but have a "formal link" with their job (have a wage, are sure to go back to work, are home for a specified period). The exact circumstances are specified at § 9.3 of the ILO definition adopted by the VIII international conference of labour statisticians (1954) modified by the XIII international conference of labour statisticians (1982) (these circumstances are illness or accident, holidays, strike, education, maternity or parental leave, bad weather, economic crisis, slack work.

Excluded from the employed are: those who have not worked in the reference week because of long illness, and of starting or ending of a job/activity.

To determine who are employed among the self-employed, the same criteria adopted for the wage earners (listed above) are adopted.

 

Unemployed: the international classification dictates three criteria that have to be simultaneously satisfied in order to classify somebody as unemployed. In particular, for each one of these criteria, the following categories are included:

1. individuals without a job (with or without remuneration)
   According to this criterion, all those who have worked at least one hour in the reference week – even in an occasional job – are not unemployed. Those who have not worked in the reference week are not unemployed if they have a formal link with their job. Therefore individuals in "chômage partiel" (who keep their job and receive an allowance during the interruption) are to be considered as employed. Instead, those individuals who have not a formal link with their job (because, for example, of a long illness or because they have ended their job/activity) are not employed and may be considered unemployed if they satisfy the other two criteria.
2. ... who are available for working (with or without remuneration)
   In practise, this condition translates into the availability to start working within 15 days (one month in case of illness). One should note that the unemployment concerns also those who are available for an unpaid work.
3. … and who are looking for a job.
   Those who define themselves as unemployed in the French questionnaire, but are not looking for a job cannot be considered "unemployed" according to the ILO definition. The concrete actions that the individual should have taken to be considered unemployed are maintaining the inscription at the labour office (the ANPE in France), as well as all the active steps undertaken to find a job in the month before the survey (answering to job announcements, looking through personal relationship, registration at an agency for temporary work, …).

Moreover, those individuals who are "without a job and available for work, who have taken steps to start a new job or an activity as self-employed in a period after the reference week" are similarly considered unemployed, even if the 3 criteria above may not be simultaneously satisfied. For example, the individuals who – in the French questionnaire – have declared of being working, and then have in fact worked 0 hours in the reference week for the reason "start of a new job" have to be considered as unemployed. And unemployed are also those who declare to have found a job that will begin in the next future.

NAF: Nomenclature d’Activités Française.
The NAF has been developed in a harmonized European framework, with the aim of clarifying the information to the agents of the unified European market.
The NAF is used to classify the enterprises, the establishments and the homogeneous production unities (parts of establishments). The economic activity that is recorded in the LFS questionnaire refers to the establishment.

 

PCS: Nomenclature des Professions et Catégories Socioprofessionnelles.
The occupational classification is not originally recorded according to the ISCO codes, but according the PCS classification. The French National Statistical Office (INSEE) has then established a correspondence between the PCS and the ISCO codes, which also resorts to the NAF (Nomenclature d’Activités Française).
One should however keep in mind that the PCS and the ISCO classifications are "philosophically" different. The latter is in fact a job classification, based on the "job post", i.e. the occupational level. The PCS (being a socio-professional classification) emphasizes on the contrary the job content.

The sample is composed by all the individuals aged 15 and more living in the main homes in a sample of geographical areas taken from the whole territory of metropolitan France. That is, first a sample of geographical areas is selected and then all the individuals living in these areas are interviewed. One third of the geographical areas is substituted every year. The exact procedure used to divide the French territory in strata, first, and in group of areas, then, is illustrated in INSEE Résultats, Enquête sur l’emploi de 1997, Résultats Détaillés.

 

The individual sample weights (depending on the inclusion in the sample) are initially 300 on the average and are then corrected to take into account the bias introduced by the non-responses and the fluctuations in the sample.

 

Correction for non-response: The sample weight of each responding household is multiplied by a coefficient close to 1, computed on the basis of 12 criteria (number of lodgings in a rural commune, in a urban area of different size, etc.). The weight is computed according to the Generalised Ranking Ratio method, i.e. the solution should minimise a certain distance from the criteria chosen. This method gives positive correction coefficients, which are close to 1.

 

Correction for random sampling: this is the correction needed to make the sample correspond as much as possible to whole population. The only external information used for this correction is the age structure, derived from the last census and corrected on the basis of the Registry and on migration flows that are supposed constant in time. The weights are computed such as the numbers of men and women aged 0 to 4, 5 to 9, …, 70 to 74, 75 and more resulting from the survey correspond to the population age structure.

The detailed results of the French Labour Force Survey are presented in INSEE Résultats, Enquête sur l’emploi de 19.., Résultats Détaillés, a volume published once a year in September of the reference year. They are equally available on diskette.