Military Industries and Occupations
Researchers should be aware of several issues regarding military industries and occupations. The questionnaire is designed so that respondents in the active Armed Forces should not be asked to report the industry and occupation of that job in the same questions that collect information about civilian jobs. Rather, respondents report their military occupational specialty as part of a series tailored to military jobs that also asks about the branch of the Armed Forces, the respondent's dates of enlistment, military pay grade, etc. This means that the military industry and occupation codes should appear very rarely in the NLSY97 data, occurring only if a respondent has a civilian job but is associated with the military in some way. However, some respondents in the active military answered the civilian jobs questions instead of the military questions in rounds 2 and 3, causing military respondents to be included in the industry and occupation variables as well as other regular employment questions like hourly rate of pay. This occurred for two reasons.
First, the question that identifies military jobs is YEMP-58500, the class of worker question, which asks whether the respondent's employer was the government, a private employer, a non-profit organization, a family business or farm, or the active Armed Forces. Respondents in the military should respond that they are in the active Armed Forces, and they are then asked the series of questions tailored to military jobs. However, some respondents with military jobs appear to have answered this question incorrectly; most of these respondents reported that they worked for the government. These respondents were then asked the set of questions about regular civilian employee jobs.
Second, some military respondents in round 3 were incorrectly routed through the civilian jobs section due to a programming error. If a respondent states that he or she is still employed with an employer reported in a previous round, the class of worker question is not asked. Instead, the respondent is routed to the correct series of questions based on a preset flag that identifies the job as military or civilian. However, this flag was not set correctly for respondents who reported military employment in round 2, and so these respondents were routed to the civilian series of questions in round 3.
These problems affected a very small number of respondents in rounds 2 and 3. However, researchers interested in civilian employment may want to remove these respondents from their analyses; conversely, users investigating military employment may want to include these respondents even though they did not answer the military series of questions. Researchers can identify respondents in the active Armed Forces by examining the variables MILFLAG and MILCODE on the employer (YEMP) roster. These roster items were edited to identify military jobs regardless of whether they were reported in the military or civilian section of the instrument. Virtually all military jobs appear as job #01 on the roster. Information about using roster variables in analyses is provided in Appendix 8 in this Codebook Supplement.