ESENER-PSR 2009 - European Agency for Safety and Health at Work

2.1.2 Commercial address-providers
The third group of address-registers are those built up and maintained by commercial
address-providers. The main customers of such address-bases are marketing and
advertisement companies, but often they are also used for representative research.
Among this type of registers, basically two sub-types can be distinguished:
(a) Yellow Pages-based address-registers,
(b) Registers based on economic balances and other economic data (e.g. entries in the
national trade-registers), sometimes supplemented by voluntary self-registrations for
commercial purposes. “Advanced suppliers” use multiple types of sources to compile their
address-lists.
This distinction is however only a theoretical one and boundaries are fluid.
(a) Yellow Pages based address-registers
The Yellow Pages based address-registers are based on the voluntary entries of companies in
the so called “Yellow Pages”. As is widely known, the Yellow Pages are telephone books
which contain telephone numbers of businesses, doctors, lawyers etc. and are provided to
households which hold an active telephone line. The entries in these registers are therefore
oriented mainly towards the end-user, which means that the addresses they contain usually
are categorised in a way which first and foremost enables individuals to easily find providers of
specific products and services. These categorizations are not always easy to transform into an
internationally acknowledged codification such as NACE, because e.g. production and sales
units are often not distinguishable as they are summarized under one and the same category.
(E.g. under the category “furniture” carpenters and furniture factories are found as well as
furniture retail shops, under “automobiles” car factories might be listed side by side with car
sales units etc.)
The orientation of the Yellow Pages towards the end-user usually also implies that in some
sectors of activity – namely in those where the bulk of activities is directly aimed at the enduser
– establishments are listed much more completely than in others.
A further and even more relevant disadvantage of Yellow-Pages based address-sources is
that they frequently do not include any information on the number of employees working in the
listed establishments. The problems this implies in practice for a survey with a disproportional
sample and a limitation to establishments of a certain minimum size (here: 10 employees) are
outlined in detail in chapter 4.2.2.
The main advantage of this type of address-register is the topicality of its entries and
especially of the telephone numbers. Listed firms have a strong self-interest in keeping their
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