- Is collecting (harvesting) vegetables from the garden for dinner “work”?  What about washing them before cooking them for the family meal?

- Is fetching water from the communal water source for cooking and drinking “work”?

- Is helping out after school in the kiosk run by a parent “work”?

- Is making home brew beer and selling it at the market “work”?

According to the definitions of economic activities in the SNA, all the above activities are employment except for cleaning the dirt off the vegetables before serving them to the family (but if the cleaning took place outside the household, by a vendor, for example, prior to sale to the household it would be work). This is because all of the above activities _except_ for preparing the vegetables for consumption are included as economic activities in the SNA. The SNA conventions exclude certain household activities (such as preparing food for the meal, cleaning the house, or caring for a household member) so these are also not counted as employment.<sup>8</sup> It is obvious that most survey respondents or even survey enumerators could not possibly be aware of these subtle details. Therefore, the simple questions “do you work?” or “what is your main job?” are not likely to illicit responses that would be consistent across respondents. Nor would the expected responses be precise enough for analyzing and comparing outcomes within the whole national statistical system. Indeed, data collected using such vague questions would be open to a variety of interpretations. Each respondent could be expected to have a “different dream” about their economic life, unknown to the interviewer and the researcher.

Survey research has been conducted to develop the best techniques and questions to use for non-wage activity in order to obtain consistent answers which would measure these economic concepts as closely as possible to the technical specifications based on the SNA and the analyst’s intent. Particular attention has been paid over the last 40 years to differences in perception and behavior across genders, age and ethnic groups, etc. which would generate inconsistent responses to a question. The difference in perceptions about the economic content of home-based work done by either gender is a clear example of where different and changing perceptions can influence responses.

Recent survey research in Tanzania, conducted by Beegle, Bardasi, Dillion and Serneels (2010), confirms that the popular understanding of the word “work” in a low-income setting is quite different from the technical specifications of labor statisticians. In the Tanzania study, the authors found that simply asking “did you do any work in the last 7 days, even for one hour?” on average resulted in a 10% decline in self-reported female LFPR, compared with a detailed module which provided an extensive list of activities which are considered work. When husbands were asked the simple question regarding their wives, an even greater undercounting occurred and vice versa for wives about their husbands (see Table 4 in Beegle et al, 2010). In the absence of detailed questions, some respondents of both genders were likely to misclassify their spouse’s

> 8 The question of which household activities are “economic” when done by a member of the household has been debated for some time.  The current definition excludes activities which are primarily caring for other members of the household.  See United Nations (2009).

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