During the acquisition of data via questionnaire or patient notes, occupations are often recorded. However, often, little is known about how to classify or rank these occupations. One useful resource is the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) system, which is a socio-economic classification system. This system can prove useful during the preparation of your data for statistical analysis if you ultimately wish to look for associations between occupational status and other variables or to summarize the occupational groups within your sample.
One way to proceed is to follow the link Standard Occupational Classification (SOC)
and identify the major occupational groups, ranked 1 to 9. You can then proceed to the Occupation Hierarchy Tool, which specifies a comprehensive list of occupations falling within each of these groups. This will assist you in deciding which occupations should receive each of the ranks 1 to 9.
When conducting interview-based questionnaires, you would do well to study the above tool in advance of (and where possible, during) the interviews in order to verify that respondents are providing job titles which are listed for your classification and therefore whether you need to request more specific information to identify this occupation within the hierarchy. As a possible safety valve, and acknowledging time constraints you may experience during interviews, there is also an Occupation Coding Tool to help you peform a search on a response item for occupational status and identify where it should sit in the hierarchy.
Categorizing Occupational Status by Margaret MacDougall is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
