Quarterly Labour Force Survey 2009

The current version of the QLFS data was downloaded from the Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) website in April 2014. Stats SA updated the QLFS results (2008-2013) to reflect the new population benchmarks from Census 2011. Although the weighting changes are not clearly documented by Stats SA, users are advised to remain aware of these slight calibration differences when employing weights. These updates are in addition to the following changes to the previous versions:

The previous version of the QLFS 2009 Q1 was downloaded from the Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) website by DataFirst in January 2012. This version differs in a number of ways from the version that was obtained by DataFirst (from Stats SA) at some undeteremined time prior. The first of these differences is the way in which observations that fit into "unspecified", “not applicable” or "missing" type categories are coded for certain variables. For example, in the older version of the QLFS 2009 Q1 the "Q418HRSWRK" variable is coded 888, with the associated label "Not applicable", for 68,388 observations. In the newer version this category of responses is assigned the code 0 and is not labelled (as it was in the previous version) for the same 68,388 observations. This recoding process has been applied to a large number of categorical variables in the datafile. A few other categorical variables have instead been recoded in a similar vein but as different (non-zero) values. For example, values of 888 for "Q4212TOTALHRS" have been redefined as having the value 88.

Second, a number of extra variables were introduced in the later version. It is unclear why these are not present in the older version of the datafile as they are detailed in metadata that was released at the same time as the original data:

1. "Geo_type" - Geography type (e.g. urban formal, rural informal, etc.)
2. "Hrswrk" - Hourse worked. A derived variable that was probably aimed at getting around problems created by the recoding of the hours worked variables used in the derivation of the underemployment variable
3. "Metro_code" - Metropolitan area code (e.g. Cape Town, eThekwini, Johannesburg, etc.)
4. "Status_Exp" - Expanded unemployment status.
5. "Stratum" - 6 digit number representing stratum formed during master sample 2006 where digit 1 represents province, based on 2005 provincial boundaries, digits 2-3 represent the metro/non-metro area and digit 4 confers geography type.

Finally, the two versions have different weights. To DataFirst's knowledge, the weighting changes are not clearly documented by Stats SA. The most likely explanation for the difference between the two sets of weights is that the newer version is calibrated to an updated set of mid-year population estimates. Users are advised to remain aware of these slight calibration differences when employing weights.