the Labour Market Survey Report - Council of European ...

Limitations: Eurostat Holdings of Member State Labour Force Survey data
Much of the analysis within this report draws on data from the official statistical unit of the European
Union. The Eurostat service is an impressive data source, and enables considerable comparative
analysis to be carried out across Member States. However, as can be guessed from the above, caution
must be exercised in this process, since the traditions for gathering official statistics in different Member
States inevitably involve differences.
Labour Force Surveys are “household” surveys. That is to say a large number of individuals are
interviewed at home (in this case) about a significant number of aspects of their working lives, and
the figures produced from the response sample (e.g. some 120,000 responses in the UK for a working
population of some 30 million) are “grossed-up” to provide estimates of the characteristics for these
different aspects for the working population as a whole.
Probably the most significant variation between the national LFS data surveys concerns the size of the
sample. These vary between country, and the sample size affects the threshold below which grossed up
figures can be considered statistically meaningful, reliable or robust. Table A-4 shows these thresholds
for this data, and they are indicated on each Figure where this caveat is relevant.
Table A-4
Member State
Code
Reliability
Threshold
(of grossedup
estimates)
Austria AT 2,000
Belgium BE 2,500
Denmark DK 2,500
Finland FI 2,500
France FR 3,500
Germany DE 8,000
Greece GR 2,500
Ireland IE 2,500
Italy IT 3,500
Luxembourg LU 500
Netherlands NL 4,500
Portugal PT 7,500
Spain ES 2,500
Sweden SE 9,000
United Kingdom UK 10,000
This means that any data involving values lower than these thresholds cannot be relied upon. Since the
size of the IT Practitioner labour market in EU Member States is now very significant, the total grossedup
estimates arising from these Labour Force Surveys are generally well above the reliability limits.
However, as cross-tabulations are carried out to clarify certain detailed characteristics of the IT Practitioner
working population (for example breaking down the total numbers into age-bands), the resulting totals
for some categories are often small enough to result in risk of statistical unreliability. For this reasons
the thresholds in the charts need to be checked (the relevant threshold is indicated in each chart title).
C E P I S I.T. PRACTITIONER SKILLS IN EUROPE | Annex A | 105