Creating a unified sickness absence series for Britain, 1971-1997.

We join time-series measures of absenteeism for Britain from two previous Institute for Labour Research Working Papers to create continuous measures of absenteeism covering 1971 to 1997. This exercise provides measures of absenteeism for Britain at the annual, quarterly and monthly time frequencies which may be of use to the research community. The first segment of the data was generated using the General Household Surveys, covers 1971-84 and is reported in Barmby et.al (1997). The second segment was generated using the Labour Force Surveys, covers 1984-97 and is reported in Barmby et. al (1999). Joining the data from these two segments is non-trivial because the GHS and LFS survey methodologies differ substantially from one another and even differ within the surveys from year to year. We seek to clarify the main sources of non-comparability of the two segments of the series over time, and to produce as consistent a series as possible. This exercise has confirmed our high confidence in the accuracy of the absence rate estimated over the LFS sample and diminshed our confidence in the accuracy of the absence rate estimated over the GHS sample. Our reservations over the GHS sample stem from the small sample size and the repeated revisions in the question schedules over this period. Conversely, our confidence in the LFS sample stems from the large sample size and the consistency of the question schedules. ; absenteeism; sickness; GHS; LFS