Version Notes
Version 2.0 of the QLFS 2008 Q1 was downloaded from the Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) website by DataFirst in January 2012. This version differs slightly from the version that was obtained by DataFirst (from Stats SA) at some undeteremined time prior. These differences are limited to changes to the way in which observations that fit into "unspecified", “not applicable” or "missing" type categories are coded for certain variables and differences in the weight variable between versions.
For the recoded variables, the differences are easiest to explain by example. In the older version of the QLFS 2008 Q1 the "Q319aODDJOBS" variable is coded 8, with the associated label "Not Specified", for 38,092 observations. In the newest version this category of responses is assigned the code 0 and is not labelled (as it was in the previous version) for the same 38,092 observations. This recoding process has been applied to most of the categorical variables in this datafile. Note that some follow a slightly different convention. For example, "Q315PREVOCCUPATION" has had values of 9999 and 9998 both recoded as zero. There are a couple of other variables for which multiple values have been redefined as zero in the updated version.
The two versions also have different weights. To DataFirst's knowledge, the weighting changes are not clearly documented by Stats SA. The most likely explanation for the difference between the two sets of weights is that the newer version is calibrated to an updated set of mid-year population estimates. Users are advised to remain aware of these slight calibration differences when employing weights.
A new version of this dataset was released in 2014. The new version (our version 2.1) was reweighted to reflect the new population benchmarks from Census 2011.
This version, version 2.1 includes the new weights for the QLFS 2008-2013 series.
