TY - JOUR AU - Mikucka, Malgorzata AU - Valentova, Marie PY - 2013/12/10 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - Employed or inactive? Cross-national differences in coding parental leave beneficiaries in European Labour Force Survey data JF - Survey Research Methods JA - SRM VL - 7 IS - 3 SE - Articles DO - 10.18148/srm/2013.v7i3.5308 UR - https://ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de/srm/article/view/5308 SP - 169-179 AB - In survey research the parental leave beneficiaries are usually coded as either employed or inactive. An exception is the European Labor Force Survey (EU-LFS), which includes parental leave among other forms of being employed but temporarily not working. This paper explores classification of parental leave takers in EU-LFS. We show that classification rules differ cross-nationally: in some countries parental leave takers are considered inactive, in others -- employed but temporarily not working. In particular in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary and Slovakia the EU-LFS data classify the beneficiaries as inactive. We estimate the number of mothers on parental leave in these countries and show that EU-LFS employment rates of women aged 18-40 are biased downwards 2-7 percentage points; for mothers of children aged 0-2 the bias reaches 12-45 percentage points.Our study shows the limited comparability of EU-LFS employment rates and warns about possible bias in cross-national studies. ER -