Deriving ISEI from ISCO-08 and ISCO-88 with 2 digits. Is it possible?

[Chiara De Siena]

Hi there!

I have a dataset covering 14 years, and I have isco88 and isco08 with only 2 digits for the whole period.
Is it possible to transform it into ISEI scores? How?

Hope someone can answer the question. Have a nice day,

Chiara

[Wouter Wakker]

You may want to have a look at the community-contributed package iscogen from SSC, which appears to be able to do that.

search iscogen

[Chiara De Siena]

I downloaded iscogen, but the following codes are not exact.
First I tried to covert isco08 with 2 digit into isco08 with 4, but:

iscogen isco08_4d = isco08 (isco08_4d), from(pl051)
variable isco08_4d not found

Then I tried to do the same thing after renaming my iscovar in isco08, but :

iscogen isco08_4d = isco(isco08_4d), from(isco08)
isco() not allowed

(I also tried to convert isco08_2digit to isei directly, but it does not work either:

iscogen isei = isei(isei), from(isco08)
variable isei not found

Any suggestions? Which is the error?

[Wouter Wakker]

I'm not familiar with ISCO codes or iscogen, but I had a look at the help file and it is documented that iscogen can only translate from 4 digit ISCO codes, so the first thing you need to do is to translate your 2-digit codes to 4-digit codes. This may be as simple as multuplying by 100 for numeric variables, or gen newvar = var + "00" for string variables.

For example, this worked for me:

clear
input isco_2d
1
11
12
21
22
71
72
end

gen isco_4d = isco_2d * 100
iscogen isei = isei(isco_4d), from(isco08)

Edit: this works in case the two digits represent submajor groups.

[daniel klein]

While the approach in #4 might technically work, the results are garbage in a substantive sense. ISEI scores vary quite substantially within 2-digit ISCO codes. For example, the ISEI score within the group of "Health Professionals" (ISCO-08 code 22) varies between 42 (Nursing Professionals, ICSO-08 code 2221) and 89 (Generalist Medical Practitioners, ICSO-08 code 2211).

[Chiara De Siena]

Yes, I also think that it is an issue, but since I use it only as control variable, maybe it could still be relevant to include it. But I'm not sure.

[Sijia Liiu]

I don't understand the difference between isco04 and isco08, what I did just directly transferred isco08 into isei by code:
iscogen isei = isei(isco08_f), from(isco08) and it worked.