1986 Survey of Union Membership

Question

Greetings:

In the course of clearing out EDRS, I found a printed codebook for the 1986 Survey of Union Membership. When I searched the Statistics Canada website to find out more about this Survey, I found a reference to: Survey of Union Membership – 1984, which is listed as being a “one-time” survey. So now I am curious if these might be referring to the same survey?

There is no publication or other date on the microdata documentation file that we have.

Answer

As you have noted, the Data, definitions and sources section of the StatCan website indicates that the 1984 Survey of Union Membership was a one time survey (http://www.statcan.gc.ca/cgi-bin/imdb/p2SV.pl?Function=getSurvey&SDDS=3830&lang=en&db=imdb&adm=8&dis=2). This is consistent with the Survey of Union membership files in the DLI collection (http://www.statcan.gc.ca/dli-ild/data-donnees/ftp/sum-eas/sum-eas1984-eng.htm).

I suspect that the print document you have found in your collection is the one also found here: http://prod.library.utoronto.ca:8090/datalib/codebooks/cst/sum86/sum86gid1.pdf

I looked through this document and the cover page does indicate that it relates to a 1986 Survey of Union Membership. Section 5 - Collection of the document however states that the data for this survey were collected during the week of Dec. 17-22 1984 . I will ask the author division to confirm this but I suspect that there may be a typo on the cover page of the print document.

Additional Information

The author division has confirmed that there was only a 1984 Survey of Union Membership (no 1986 survey). I am not sure if the print document you found is identical to the one I linked to below but if it is, there is a typo on the cover page and the date should read 1984 (not 1986).