Methodology of the Canadian Labour Force Survey
Appendix A.1
Glossary Methodology of the Canadian Labour Force Survey
Appendix A.1
Glossary

More detailed information on many of the terms in this glossary can be found at the following links.

Census Dictionary:
http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2011/ref/dict/98-301-X2011001-eng.pdf

Geography Catalogue:
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/92-196-x/92-196-x2011001-eng.pdf

Guide to the Labour Force Survey:
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/71-543-g/71-543-g2015001-eng.pdf

Address Register (AR)
The Address Register is a database of residential addresses maintained to support the census and other household surveys.  The database contains over 15,000,000 addresses and has national coverage, although it is more accurate in population centres.  The three main products derived from the AR are the Dwelling Universe File (DUF), the Residential Telephone File (RTF) and the Socio-Economic File (SEF).

Address Register (AR) Group
The Dwelling Universe File extract used by LFS has PSU identification and sequence number applied to every dwelling. The completeness and accuracy of the extract at the PSU level is estimated in order to assign the PSU one of three group numbers.

• 0: PSUs in mailout area with no intial listing. The list of dwellings is considered to be of good quality. Selection is performed from the current list. Paper maps for listing maintenance are only generated upon request.
• 1: PSUs in the non-mailout area with no initial listing. The list of dwellings is considered to be of good quality. Selection is performed from the current list. Paper maps are generated automatically and may be used for list maintenance through time.
• 2: PSUs in the non-mailout area with initial listing.  The quality of the list is considered of poor quality, and initial listing takes place before the first sample selection occurs. Paper maps are generated automatically and may be used for list maintenance through time.

Allocation
Allocation is the process of portioning out a fixed sample size into various provincial and/or subprovincial areas in order to satisfy various constraints on collection costs and/or on reliability of estimates.

Area frame
A frame of units based on geographical areas, such as Dissemination Areas or similar geography.  It is usually used when there is not an adequate list frame of the ultimate survey units.

Block
A block, sometimes called a Census block or a Dissemination block, is an area bounded on all sides by roads and/or boundaries of standard geographic areas. Census blocks cover all the territory of Canada. They are the smallest geographic area for which population and dwelling counts are stored.  It must be noted that blocks are not available to the public, but are used internally as the smallest level of geography upon which both collection and dissemination geographies are built.

Block-face

A block-face is one side of a street between two consecutive features intersecting that street. The features can be other streets or boundaries of standard geographic areas. Block-faces are used for generating block-face representative points, which in turn are used for geocoding and census data extraction when the street and address information are available.

Collective dwelling
A collective dwelling refers to a dwelling of a commercial, institutional or communal nature where people can reside but where the concept of a single family dwelling is difficult to apply. It includes lodging or rooming houses, hotels, motels, tourist homes, nursing homes, hospitals, staff residences, communal quarters (military bases), work camps, jails, group homes, and so on. Collective dwellings may be occupied by usual residents or solely by foreign residents and/or by temporarily present persons.

Census division
Census division (CD) is the general term for provincially legislated areas (such as county, municipalité régionale de comté and regional district) or their equivalents. Census divisions are intermediate geographic areas between the province/territory level and the municipality (census subdivision).

Census metropolitan area or census agglomeration
A census metropolitan area (CMA) or a census agglomeration (CA) is formed by one or more adjacent municipalities centred on a large urban area (known as the urban core). A CMA must have a total population of at least 100,000 of which 50,000 or more must live in the urban core. A CA must have an urban core population of at least 10,000. To be included in the CMA or CA, other adjacent municipalities must have a high degree of integration with the central urban area, as measured by commuting flows derived from census place of work data.

Dissemination area
A dissemination area (DA) is a small, relatively stable geographic unit composed of one or more adjacent dissemination blocks. It is the smallest standard geographic area for which all census data are disseminated. DAs cover all the territory of Canada. It is created as a unit for dissemination of Census data.

Design effect
The design effect of an estimator is the ratio of the actual variance of an estimator under the current sample design to what it would be under a simple random sampling design of the same number of elements.

Dwelling
Refers to a set of living quarters in which a person or a group of persons resides or could reside. Unoccupied dwellings are called vacant. For the LFS, a dwelling consists of any set of living quarters that is structurally separate and has a private entrance outside the building or from a common hall or stairway inside the building.

Economic region
An Economic region (ER) is a grouping of complete Census divisions (CDs) (with one exception in Ontario) created as a standard geographic unit for analysis of regional economic activity. They have been established in consultation with the provinces, except for Quebec, where Economic regions are designated by law (‘les régions administratives’). ERs generally correspond to regions used by the province for administrative and statistical purposes. The boundaries in current use are based on the 2011 Standard Geographical Classification.

Employment insurance economic region
A set of regions across the country defined by Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) for the purpose of distributing Employment Insurance benefits in an equitable manner. The LFS is responsible for producing timely estimates required by ESDC in order to establish standards for admissibility to the program and the duration of benefits.

Employment
Employed persons are those who,during the reference week:

1. did any work at all at a job or business, that is, paid work in the context of an employer-employee relationship, or self-employment. It also includes persons who did unpaid family work, which is defined as unpaid work contributing directly to the operation of a farm, business or professional practice owned and operated by a related member of the same household; or
2. had a job but were not at work due to factors such as their own illness or disability, personal or family responsibilities, vacation or a labour dispute. This category excludes persons not at work because they were on layoff or between casual jobs, and those who did not then have a job (even if they had a job to start at a future date).

Employment rate (employment population ratio)
Number of employed persons expressed as a percentage of the population 15 years of age and over. The employment rate for a particular group (age, sex, marital status, province, etc.) is the number employed in that group expressed as a percentage of the population for that group.

Household
Any person or group of persons living in a dwelling. A household may consist of any combination of: one person living alone, one or more families, a group of people who are not related but who share the same dwelling. Note that foreign residents and persons with a usual place of residence elsewhere are not surveyed.

Labour force
Civilian non-institutional population 15 years of age and over who, during the survey reference week, were either employed or unemployed. Prior to 1966, only persons aged 14 and over were covered by the survey.

Labour force status
A labour force status classification (including employed, unemployed, and not in the labour force) is assigned to each respondent aged 15 and over, according to their responses to a number of questions during the interview.

Listing
Listing is the process by which the dwellings that belong to one area (usually a PSU) are recorded on paper or electronically.  This field exercise is required for selected PSUs when a high quality list of dwellings is not available to perform the second stage selection of dwellings. Maps of the area, with clear boundaries, are required to determine where to list. Most listing is sequenced in a specific pattern in order to ensure all block-faces are examined, and in order to be able to re-locate a particular address months or years after initial listing.

Listing maintenance
Listing in the LFS proceeds in two stages. The second stage is ongoing maintenance of a pre-existing list. The list was originally generated by initial listing (AR group 2) or by initial loading (AR group 0 and AR group 1). The extent of changes is usually minor unless significant growth occurs in the area of the PSU, or significant errors are found in the initial listing effort or with the initial loading. Updates are sent directly to Head Office without involving senior interviewers, unless subsampling is requested due to significant growth.

Multi-stage sampling
Multi-stage sampling is the process of selecting a sample in two or more successive stages.  The units selected at the first stage are called the primary sampling units (PSUs).  The units selected at the second stage are called secondary sampling units (SSUs) or sometimes ultimate sampling units if it is the last stage.  The units at each stage are different in structure and are hierarchical.  In the case of the LFS, PSUs corresponds to dissemination areas selected within strata. In the second stage, dwellings are selected within each first-stage selected PSU.

Participation rate
The participation rate represents the labour force expressed as a percentage of the population 15 years of age and over. The participation rate for a particular group (age, sex, etc.) is the labour force in that group expressed as a percentage of the population for that group.

Population centre
A population centre has a population of at least 1,000 and a population density of 400 persons or more per square kilometre, based on the current census population count. All areas outside population centres are classified as rural areas. Taken together, population centres and rural areas cover all of Canada. Population centre population includes all population living in the cores, secondary cores and fringes of Census metropolitan areas (CMAs) and Census agglomerations (CAs), as well as the population living in population centres outside CMAs and CA.

Primary sampling unit
Units selected at the first stage of sampling in a multistage design are called primary sampling units, or PSUs. With the 2015 redesign, the LFS PSUs are mainly defined as dissemination areas.

Probability proportional to size sampling

Probability proportional to size (PPS) sampling is a technique that uses auxiliary information and yields unequal probability of inclusion.  If population units vary in size and these sizes are known, such information can be used during sampling to increase the statistical efficiency.  In the case of the LFS, the PSUs are selected with PPS, and the size measure used is related to the approximate number of households in each PSU.  More information on the size measure is provided in Section 6.2.1.

Reference period
A period of time used in surveys for which respondents must recall and answer. For example, “how many hours did you work last week?” In the LFS, the reference week is usually the week containing the 15th day of the month.

Rotation
Sample rotation is the periodic replacement of one unit with another. The LFS has

• Dwelling rotation (within a PSU) after six months in the survey
• PSU rotation after two to fifty years in the survey, with an average around ten years.  In many cases, there is a survey redesign before rotation of the PSU takes place.

The set of dwellings (or the PSUs that contain them) that rotate in the same month are referred to as a rotation panel or a rotation group. Each panel consists of one sixth of the sample. As a result, each month has a mix of dwellings in their first, second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth interview.

Rural area
Rural areas include all territory lying outside population centres. Taken together, population centres and rural areas cover all of Canada. Rural population includes all population living in the rural areas of Census metropolitan areas (CMAs) and Census agglomerations (CAs), as well as population living in rural areas outside CMAs and CAs.

Sampling rate
The sampling rate is the ratio of the size of the sample to the size of the population on the frame. A 1 in 20 sample would select 5% of the units for data collection and have a 0.05 sampling rate, or an inverse sampling rate of 20.

Sampling variance
The sampling variance measures the extent to which the estimates of a population parameter, obtained from all different possible samples selected using the same design, differ from one another.  It is calculated as the average value of the squared difference of the estimate from its mean over all possible samples.

Slippage rate
The slippage rate is a measure of discrepancy between an estimate of the size of a population (e.g. province or age-sex group) and the corresponding Census-projected value for the same population. It equals (1 – (ratio of estimate to projection))x100%.

Stratification
Stratification is the process of dividing the survey primary sampling units into homogeneous, mutually exclusive groups called strata, and then samples are selected independently from each stratum.

Systematic sampling
Systematic sampling is a method of selecting a sample in which the first item is selected from the population randomly (random start), with the remaining sample items drawn at equally spaced intervals (according to the inverse sampling rate). With a sampling rate of one in ten, and a random starting point of seven, the 7^th  unit is selected, and every 10^th unit thereafter is selected (17^th, 27^th, 37^th, etc.) until the end of the list is reached.

Target population
The target population is the population for which information is desired. The target population covered by the LFS corresponds to all persons aged 15 years and over residing in the provinces of Canada, with the exception of the following: persons living on Indian reserves, full-time members of the regular Armed Forces, and persons living in institutions (for example, inmates of penal institutions and patients in hospitals or nursing homes who have resided in the institution for more than six months).

Three month moving average estimate
A three month moving average estimate is an average of the values of the estimate for each of the most recent three months.  It can be produced every month, using the most recent three months.  The average is defined slightly differently whether the estimate is a total or a rate. Mathematical expression is given in Section 6.1.

Unemployment
Unemployed persons are those who, during the reference week:

1. were without work but had looked for work in the past four weeks ending with the reference period and were available for work; or
2. were on temporary layoff due to business conditions, with an expectation of recall, and were available for work; or
3. were without work, had a job to start within four weeks from the reference period and were available for work.

Unemployment rate
Number of unemployed persons expressed as a percentage of the labour force. The unemployment rate for a particular group (for example, age, sex, marital status) is the number of unemployed in that group expressed as a percentage of the labour force for that group.  This rate is one of the key statistics produced by the LFS.

Vacancy rate
The vacancy rate is the proportion of unoccupied dwellings. Out-of-scope dwellings such as businesses and demolished dwellings are not included in the denominator.

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