The 2001-2002 California Workforce Survey: Background, Methods, and Sample

Abstract

Labor-FO2.qxd 11:35 AM Page 63 The 2001–2002 California Workforce Survey Background, Methods, and Sample THOMAS PIAZZA, NEIL FLIGSTEIN, and M A R G A R E T W E I R T  ‒     (),  by the Institute for Labor and Employment of the University of California, assesses the current state of the California workforce. It is the basis of the analyses in the next two chapters in this volume, by Fligstein and Sharone and by Weir. The survey, con- ducted by the Survey Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, col- lected data by telephone on Californians’ attitudes toward a wide range of issues, as well as data on the status, conditions, and practices of employment in the state. The interviews took place from July 10, 2001, to January 27, 2002. 1 SAM PLI NG M ETHOD S There are two telephone samples in the CWS. The first and larger sample is a cross- sectional sample of California adults eligible for the interviews, according to the cri- teria set for the survey: respondents had to be adults (ages 18 or over), living in a res- idential household, and able to be interviewed in English or Spanish. For the cross-sectional sample the survey team succeeded in conducting completed inter- views with 1,255 adults, 140 of which were in Spanish. The response rate was 50.8 per- cent. The second sample was a supplementary oversample of unionized workers. The purpose of the oversampling was to increase the number of unionized workers in the sample to facilitate comparative analyses of unionized and nonunionized workers. In the union-member oversample, households were selected as in the cross-sectional sample, but only adult union members working full- or part-time at the time of the interview were eligible for an interview. The supplementary sampling yielded inter- views with an additional 149 unionized workers, 6 of them in Spanish; the response rate for this sample was 70.2 percent. 2 1. Note that the interviewers asked those not working at the time of the interview most of the at- titudinal questions in the survey, but of course, for those respondents, they had to skip any ques- tions about current jobs. The text of the questions asked on the survey instrument is available online at http://sda.berkeley.edu:7502/D3/Calabor/Doc/cal.htm (under “Indexes”). 2. For further details on the sampling outcome, see ibid., “Appendix C: Field Outcome.” For the the 2001–2002 california workforce survey