All persons who had no employment during the reference week, were available for work, except for temporary illness, and had made specific efforts, such as contacting employers, to find employment sometime during the 4-week period ending with the reference week. Persons who were waiting to be recalled to a job from which they had been laid off need not have been looking for work to be classified as unemployed. For persons on layoff, duration of unemployment represents the number of full weeks since the end of their most recent period of employment. Two useful measures of the duration of unemployment are the mean and the median. Mean duration is the arithmetic average computed from single weeks of unemployment.
Median duration is the midpoint of a distribution of weeks of unemployment.
The reasons for unemployment are divided into five major groups. Civilian labor force . The civilian labor force comprises the total of all civilians classified as employed and unemployed. Unemployment rate .The unemployment rate represents the proportion of the civilian labor force that is unemployed. Participation rate .