Probing for Informal Work Activity

Abstract

The Current Population Survey (CPS) is the source of official US labor force statistics. The wording of the CPS employment questions may not always cue respondents to include informal work in their responses, especially when providing proxy reports about other household members. In a survey experiment conducted using a sample of Amazon Mechanical Turk respondents, additional probing identified a substantial amount of informal work activity not captured by the CPS employment questions, both among those with no employment and among those categorized as employed based on answers to the CPS questions. Among respondents providing a proxy report for another household member, the share identifying additional work was systematically greater among those receiving a detailed probe that offered examples of types of informal work than among those receiving a simpler global probe. Similar differences between the effects of the detailed and the global probe were observed when respondents answered for themselves only among those who had already reported multiple jobs. The findings suggest that additional probing could improve estimates of employment and multiple job holding in the CPS and other household surveys, but that the nature of the probe is likely to be important.

Measuring the Gig Economy: Current Knowledge and Open Issues

“…15 While these numbers refer to self-employment at any point during the year rather than to self-employment at a point in time, they suggest that there may be a significant amount of non-employee work that would not be uncovered by probing only about an already-reported main job (the final group in the cited numbers based on the linked annual data) and that such a focus may miss important ongoing changes. A recent survey experiment described in Abraham and Amaya (2018) provides some additional evidence about how different approaches to probing for informal employment might affect the share of people for whom employment activity is reported (the employment rate) and the share of those with employment for whom more than one job is reported (the multiple job holding rate). The experiment was embedded in a survey carried out for the 2016 Joint Program in Survey Methodology (JPSM) practicum.…”

“…The first row in the upper panel of Table 5, summarizing selected results from Abraham and Amaya (2018), displays the employment rate that is estimated based on the standard CPS questions; the second row displays the augmented employment rate that incorporates the additional information provided in response to the informal employment probe; and the third row shows the difference between the two estimates. The employment rate is defined as the percent of the sample categorized as having been employed during the survey reference week.…”

Zero-hours contracts and labour market policy

“…There are two parts to this, the first drawing on data from the Quarterly Labour Force Survey and the second on newly collected survey data on alternative work arrangements. Part of the latter survey is devoted to ZHCs, which are only limitedly surveyed and understood in existing survey data sources (Abraham and Amaya, 2018) and -consequently -in the literature, and the intention is to fill this gap with new evidence.…”

Measuring the ‘Gig’ Economy: Challenges and Options

“…These surveys generally ask about work done by the respondent for pay or profit or about the respondent's jobs or businesses, yet respondents may not think about informal work activity in these respects. Abraham and Amaya (2018) and Katz and Krueger (2019) both find that these traditional questions fail to capture a substantial number of people involved in informal work and that additional probing can be used to mitigate this problem. Abraham and Amaya (2018) find that additional probing is particularly effective in capturing informal work activity from those reporting two or more jobs in response to the standard questions and also from proxies reporting on work activity by others in the household.…”