Occupational coding in multi-country surveys is mostly a black box: have national survey agencies classified the same occupational titles into the same category across countries? This paper attempts to validate the coding from 5-digit occupational titles into the 4-digit occupational units of the international ISCO-08 classification, based on a comparison of coding indexes from national statistical offices. Two research objectives are central. To what extent are occupational titles in the coding indexes similar, when comparing their English translations? What percentage of similar occupational titles is coded similarly across countries? To answer these questions, we merged titles from 20 coding indexes …

Can self-identification of occupation be applied in web surveys by using a look-up table with coded occupational titles, in contrast to other survey modes where an open format question with office-coding has to be applied? This article is among the first to explore this approach, using a random sampled web survey (N=3,224) with a three-level search tree with 1,603 occupations and offering a text box at the bottom of each 3rd level list. 67% of respondents ticked in total 585 occupations, of which 349 by at least two respondents and 236 by only one, pointing to a long tail in …