ABSTRACT
There are several reasons to focus more attention on the collection, scaling, and analysis of occupational data than has recently been the case. First, job-holding is the most important social role held by most adults outside their family or household. When we meet someone new, often our first question is, “What do you do?” and that is a very good question. Job-holding defines how we spend much of our time, and it provides strong clues about the activities and circumstances in which that time is spent. Second, job-holding tells us about the technical and social skills that we bring to the labor market, and for most people job-holding delimits current and future economic prospects. Thus, even for persons who are not attached to the labor market, past jobs or the jobs held by other members of the same family or household provide information about economic and social standing. Third, as market labor has become nearly universal among adult women as well as men, it is increasingly possible to characterize individuals in terms of their own current or past jobs. Fourth, once we have a good job description, it is possible to map jobs into many classifications, scales, and measures. Fifth, measurement of jobs and occupations does not entail the same problems of refusal, recall, reliability, and stability as occur in the measurement of income or wealth. Job descriptions—contemporary or retrospective, from job-holders or from their family members—are imperfect, but the reliability and validity of carefully collected occupational data are high enough to support sustained analysis (Hauser, Sewell, and Warren 1994). Thus, even if we are limited to retrospective questions, we can confidently trace occupational trajectories across the adult years. The same cannot be said of earnings trajectories, let alone other components of personal or household income or wealth.
