About the Labour Force Survey (LFS)

What is it?

The Labour Force Survey is a survey of households living at private addresses in the UK. Its purpose is to provide information on the UK labour market which can then be used to develop, manage, evaluate and report on labour market policies. The survey is managed by the Office for National Statistics in Great Britain and by the Central Survey Unit of the Department of Finance and Personnel in Northern Ireland on behalf of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment (DETINI).

Since 1992, the LFS in Great Britain has run as a quarterly survey (1994/95 for Northern Ireland). The quarterly surveys have until Spring 2006 operated on a seasonal quarter basis. However, mostly due to an EU requirement under regulation, in May 2006 the LFS moved to calendar quarters. The 2006/07 data is the first set of HSE data based on the LFS to be affected by this change. For more details about this change see 'Comparability of LFS data over time'.

How is it structured?

The LFS is intended to be representative of the whole population of the UK. The sample design currently consists of about 50 000 responding households in Great Britain every quarter, representing about 0.1% of the GB population. A further sample of about 2 000 responding households in Northern Ireland is added to this, representing 0.1% of the NI population, allowing United Kingdom analyses to be made. The sample design is an unclustered sample of addresses for the whole of Great Britain (and similarly for Northern Ireland). The quarterly survey has a panel design whereby individuals stay in the sample for 5 consecutive quarters (or waves), with a fifth of the sample (about 11 000 private households in the UK) replaced each quarter. Thus there is an 80% overlap in the samples for each successive survey.

What are the participation levels?

In the 2 years ending June 2006, the household specific response rate for Great Britain has fluctuated between 61% and 64%, down from between 70% and 73% during 1998 and 2 000.

The LFS allows interviewers to take answers to questions by proxy if a respondent is unavailable. This is usually from another related adult who is a member of the same household. About a third of the LFS responses are collected by proxy, with variation in this proportion by age and sex.

Dawe and Knight (1997)¹ showed that for many key variables the agreement between proxy informants and the same information given by the subjects themselves to be high - above 80%. However, for those variables requiring very detailed numerical information such as hours worked, agreement was found to be less satisfactory. J R Jones et al² reported that in 2004/05 proxies reported rather less work-related illness (3.6% of interviews) than first person respondents (5.3% of interviews). Whilst this difference may reflect the difficulty that a proxy respondent has in correctly providing this personal information, it may reflect a 'healthy worker' effect whereby the respondent is more likely to be away from home and their response correctly given by a proxy respondent. Because of this uncertainty, no adjustment is made in the data for proxy responses.

For more detailed background information on the LFS than is given here see 'The LFS User Guide Volume 1: Background and Methodology'

References

¹ Dawe, F and Knight, I (1997): A Study of proxy response in the Labour Force Survey. Survey Methodology Bulletin (No. 40)
² J R Jones MSc, C S Huxtable BSc and J T Hodgson MSc: Self-reported work-related illness in 2004/05: Results from the Labour Force Survey