I’m working on NEPS SC6 to construct job-related training by occupations. Briefly, I want to see at occupational level, how many courses/trainings were taken between 2009 and 2019. To do so, I want to merge individual’s courses/training history with employment history. Now my question is, in „spCourses“, all courses were asked if they were taken for professional reason or not. However, in „spFurtherEdu1“, a large share of training/courses have a value of ‚-54‘ in this question. Based on my understanding, it means this question was not asked for them.
So my questions are:
1. Should I take -54 (missing by design) as „not related to professional reasons“?
2. Shall I include courses/trainings from „spFurtherEdu1“ in my calculation?
to create a full indicator on professional reasons vs private reasons of the course, you need to construct it from different datasets depending on wave. For wave 2-10, the item was asked in a random loop for two different courses and thus you get the info from furtherEdu2. For waves 11+ however, you get the info from FurtherEdu1 and spcourses.
consequently, -54 does not mean „not related to professional reasons“. It was just not asked in this module in waves x.