Professional Worker Career Experience Survey (PWCES) Data and Metadata

The Professional Worker Career Experience Survey (PWCES) contains responses from 752 working professionals who were surveyed between December 2003 and September 2004. The survey contains a rich combination of data on personal education and work histories, family structure, employment and demographic characteristics, and variety of personality scales. These data are available for download as a text file (.csv) and as a STATA (.dta) file. Anyone is free to use these data for scholarly purposes, but as a condition of use they must include a citation to this users guide in any papers or published articles that employ these data.

Description

The Professional Worker Career Experience Survey (PWCES) contains responses from 752 working professionals who were surveyed between December 2003 and September 2004. The survey contains a combination of data on personal education and work histories, family structure, employment and demographic characteristics, and variety of personality scales. The data were collected originally as part of an investigation of the reasons for the under representation of women and minorities in the Information Technology (IT) workforce.

The survey instrument was made up of two separate sets of questions. The first part, was developed by the KU research team gathered information on the following topics: Work history and job characteristics Education history and experiences Family history and experiences Career choice influences Family and other non-work obligations Attitudes and perceptions of work experiences Life/family/work conflicts Job and career satisfaction Personal attitudes and beliefs Demographic and salary information

The second part of the survey consisted of the Strong Interest Inventory (SII), a widely used vocational counseling instrument that is developed and maintained by Consulting Psychologists Press (CPP). After completing the first part of the survey users were transferred to a site maintained by CPP and filled out responses to the SII online. CPP then transferred these responses to the KU team and responses from the two parts were matched based on individual identifiers.

After the data collection phase was completed the KU research team cleaned the responses by examining consistency of responses. In addition a number of additional variables were constructed based on survey responses.

Respondents were classified as either IT or non-IT employees based on self-reported current career field one of 13 categories or "Other"), and specific job title (open ended). Based on this information a total of 749 respondents could be placed in one career field or the other, with 200 being coded as IT and 549 coded as non-IT.

Data collected in the first part of the survey allowed the KU research team to construct a number of instruments that have been used by previous researchers. These include measures of: Work-family conflict, job satisfaction, life satisfaction, work stress, and Big Five personality constructs (NEOAC). Based on responses to the Strong Interest Inventory it was possible to construct measures of Holland's General Occupational Themes (RIASEC). Each of these instruments is described more fully in the glossary included as Appendix A to this users guide.

Because not all respondents completed the entire survey sample sizes will depend on the specific questions being analyzed.

NOTE: Descriptive text in the Documentation and DDI files was revised on 08/06/11 and those files updated in the zipped collection of files.

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/1808/5491

Collections

CSTEP Technical Reports [1]
Economics Scholarly Works [171]
School of Business Scholarly Works [202]

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