Italian Labour Force Survey – October (2021)

The Italian Labour Force Survey is the main source of statistical information on the Italian labor market. The information gathered from the population constitutes the basis on which official estimations of employment and unemployment are calculated, as well as information on the main job’s issues –occupation, the sector of economic activity, hours worked, contracts’ type and duration, training.

The survey data are used to analyze a number of individual, family and social factors too, such as the increasing labor mobility, changing professions, the growth in female participation, etc.., which determine the difference in labor participation of the population.

Starting from the first quarter of 2021, the indications of European Regulation 1700/2019 have been transposed, which concern in particular the changes in the definitions of family and employee, and a new questionnaire has been adopted (see notes).

The questionnaire is divided into several sections. In particular, in addition to the first socio-demographic information, the first section covers the employment status during the interview’s week, dealing with questions about the type of work, hours worked, reasons for not working.

The second section – reserved for employed people – covers the main job, investigating, in particular, the position in the profession, the industry in which he works, the company he works for, the type of contract, working full-time or part-time and reasons for his selection, working hours, overtime hours, shift work, night and weekend work, job transfer, salary, job satisfaction.

The third section – always reserved for employed people – concerns the secondary work (if any). It’s exclusively addressed to respondents who carry out another activity compared to the main one and only detects certain information such as the type of activity, type of contract, occupation, the economic sector he works in, hours worked.

The fourth section – for unemployed people – collects information about previous work experiences: last work, type of contract, occupation, economic sector, the reasons for the interruption of work.

The fifth section deals with the job search. It investigates the reason for seeking a job, the actions put in place to look for it, the channels used to look for and the type of work sought.

The sixth section deals with self-perceived employment conditions, and retirement.

The seventh section concerns employment services and employment agencies, and investigates their use by the respondents: quantity of contacts, reason for contact, services required.

The eighth section concerns education and training: degree obtained, course of study currently attended, professional training.

The last section focuses on the self-perception of the employment status, compared to the previous year.

Data are available for free in CSV format (registration required). After logging in, please click on the green button  in the box at the right.

In order to optimize the time of use of the dataset, UniData offers a service of conversion in the statistical software format (SPSS, Stata, R or SAS). For detailed information visit the Services for Istat Data page.

For members, instead, data are available in the main formats used by the software for the statistical analysis.

Keywords: employment, labour, unemployment