INSTITUTIONAL ENVIRONMENT
The most recent Barriers and Incentives to Labour Force Participation survey was conducted throughout Australia during the 2006-07 financial year (excluding the months of August and September 2006). It was a component of the 2006-07 Multi-Purpose Household Survey (MPHS), collected as a supplement to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Labour Force Survey (LFS).
The Barriers and Incentives to Labour Force Participation survey provides data on people aged 18 years and over who are either not employed or work less than 16 hours.
RELEVANCE
The most recent Barriers and Incentives to Labour Force Participation survey was conducted throughout Australia during the 2006-07 financial year (excluding the months of August and September 2006). It was a component of the 2006-07 Multi-Purpose Household Survey (MPHS), collected as a supplement to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Labour Force Survey (LFS).
The Barriers and Incentives to Labour Force Participation survey provides data on people aged 18 years and over who are either not employed or work less than 16 hours.
For a complete list of populations and data items collected in this survey see Appendix – RRI/BI 2006–07 Populations and Data Items List.
TIMELINESS
The Barriers and Incentives to Labour Force Participation survey is collected biennially, and was first conducted in 2004–05. Data from the survey is released approximately six months after the completion of enumeration i.e. during December.
ACCURACY
The number of completed interviews (after taking into account scope and coverage exclusions) for the Barriers and Incentives to Labour Force Participation survey was 5,947. The response rate was approximately 83% after taking the exclusions into account. See the Explanatory Notes (paragraph 11) for more information. The exclusion of people living in very remote parts of Australia has only a minor impact on aggregate estimates, except for the Northern Territory where these people account for around 23% of the population.
The MPHS was designed primarily to provide estimates at the Australia level. Broad estimates are available for states and territories, though users should exercise caution when using estimates at this level because of the presence of high sampling errors. RSEs for all estimates in the publication are available on the ABS website. As a guide, estimates and RSEs for Table 1 and Table 2 are presented in the Technical note.
COHERENCE
The following changes were made to the Barriers and Incentives to Labour Force Participation survey for the 2006–07 cycle in order to enhance the quality of the data:
- Data on availability was collected in the non-quarter months for people who usually worked 0–15 hours per week and preferred to work more hours but had not done anything in the 4 weeks prior to the reference week to obtain more hours of work. This data was imputed in the 2004–05 survey (see paragraph 18 'Availability not determined' in the 2004–05 6239.0 Explanatory Notes). Comparative data is presented in Table 1 of the 2006–07 publication.
- For the data items 'All/main reason for not wanting work/more hours', the response category 'Caring for children/pregnancy/home duties' was split in order to separate 'caring for children' reasons. The categories can be combined in order to compared with 2004–05 data.
- For the data items 'All/main reasons for not wanting work/more hours' the category 'No need/retired from full-time work (for now)' was expanded to 'No need/satisfied with current arrangements/retired from full-time work (for now)' in 2006–07. This has had minimal impact as this is where respondents who 'were happy with current arrangements' would have been categorised in 2004–05.
- Questions that asked about 'last worked full-time' were rephrased as 'when you last worked in a job of 35 hours or more'. This change has had minimal implications.
- More detail was collected for 'other' type responses for the items 'All reasons/main reason not looking for work/more hours', given that 'other' was the biggest category in 2004–05. This resulted in the inclusion of the additional category 'No need/satisfied with current arrangements/retired from full-time work (for now)'.
- In 2004-05 the "preferred number of hours" was set to 35 hours for those people who were not in the labour force who said they would prefer "full-time hours". In 2006-07 the actual number of preferred hours was recorded.
- New data items included in 2006–07 are: main reason not wanting work/more hours, main child-care reason not looking for work/more hours, age of youngest child, partner's labour force status and partner's full-time or part-time status in employment.
INTERPRETABILITY
The Barriers and Incentives to Labour Force Participation publication contains detailed Explanatory Notes, Technical Notes and a Glossary that provide information on the terminology, classifications and other technical aspects associated with these statistics.
Seasonally adjusted and trend estimates are not produced. The estimates are based on information collected over the financial year. However, seasonal weighting is not undertaken. The survey was not run in August and September 2006 due to enumeration issues with one of the other topics included in MPHS.
ACCESSIBILITY
In addition to the PDF publication, the tables and associated RSEs will be available in spreadsheet form on the website.
Data is available on request. Note that detailed data can be subject to high relative standard errors and, in some cases, may result in data being confidentialised.
An expanded confidentialised unit record file (cat. no. 4100.0) will be produced for this survey and is expected to be released in February 2008.
For further information about these or related statistics, contact the National Information and referral centre on 1300 135 070 or Labour Market Section on Canberra (02) 6252 7206.
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