Period-specific information

See New quality measures for the Household Labour Force Survey for more information on the sample rate and response rates.

HLFS

Impact of COVID-19 on collection period and response rates

Interviewing for the March 2020 quarter was planned to conclude on Sunday 5 April. Because of growing concerns around the spread of COVID-19, HLFS field staff stopped all face-to-face interviewing on the evening of 20 March. Contact centre staff continued to make outbound calls for the HLFS until 25 March. After this date, they moved to assist the government’s Healthline. Because of this, very few HLFS respondents allocated to week 12 and 13 were able to be contacted. Letters were sent to respondents who were yet to be contacted, asking them to phone in. Collection efforts in the first 2 months were strong, so the overall response rate and achieved sample rate did not suffer greatly. January had an achieved sample rate of 81.2 percent, while February achieved 80.2 percent. However, the rate of 49.9 percent for March, means the collection distribution is skewed to early weeks.

Outliers

During the seasonal adjustment process, X-13-ARIMA-SEATS can give less weight to the irregular component. Specifically, if the estimated irregular component at a point in time is sufficiently large compared with the standard deviation of the irregular component as a whole, then the irregular component at that point can be downweighted or removed completely and re-estimated. We refer to such observations as partial- and zero-outliers, respectively. In practice, the downweighting of outliers does little to seasonally adjusted data, but the impact of the outliers on the trend series will generally be reduced. However, if an outlier ceases to be an outlier as more data becomes available, then significant revisions to the trend series become possible.

There were no outliers in our main series in the last year.

HLFS pre- and post-calibration weight

The following figure shows that while the distribution of the pre- and post-calibration weights differs within a quarter, the difference between the weights typically does not change from quarter to quarter.

The undercoverage rate indicates how representative the pre-calibrated sample is. The higher the undercoverage rate, the less representative the pre-calibrated sample.

Usually the undercoverage rate in the HLFS is around 20 percent. The overall undercoverage rate for the HLFS in the March 2020 quarter was 18.2 percent. This compares with 18.4 in the December 2019 quarter and 17.9 percent in the March 2019 quarter.

Revisions to HLFS

Each quarter, we apply the seasonal adjustment process to the latest quarter and all previous quarters. Every estimate is subject to revision each quarter as new data is added, which means that seasonally adjusted estimates for previous quarters may change slightly. In practice, estimates more than two years from the end-point will change little.

The December 2019 quarter unemployment rate was unchanged at 4.0 percent after we applied seasonal adjustment.

This table lists the changes in estimates between the current and previous quarters for the seasonally adjusted data.

This table presents revisions for the trend estimates. Trend revisions are generally larger than those of the seasonally adjusted data.

The table below shows the average of all such absolute revisions, expressed relatively, and indicates to what extent the current estimates might be revised when the revised data for the next quarter becomes available.

General information and methodology

For general information and methodology on the specific surveys within the labour market statistics release, please see the following Datainfo+ pages:

• Household Labour Force Survey
• Labour Cost Index
• Quarterly Employment Survey