Study title

Statistics Norway established the Labor Force Survey (LFS) in 1972, and it has been conducted quarterly ever since. The LFS measures the population's participation in the labor market and provides comprehensive information on unemployment, employment, people outside the labor force, temporary employees, underemployed and other subgroups that are not captured by register-based statistics. This makes the LFS one of the most important sources of information about conditions in the Norwegian labor market. Right from the start, the aim has been to ensure that the survey is comparable with similar surveys internationally. Today, the LFS is designed in accordance with the EU's statistical regulations to ensure consistent and comparable European statistics. The LFS data contains long time series, and although there have been some breaks in the time series due to changes in the questionnaire and data collection, the most central variables have been continuously included since the start. This makes it possible to present time series data for the employed, unemployed and people outside the labor force all the way back to 1972. From 2020 to 2021, a significant break in the time series was necessary due to the implementation of a new framework regulation for European social statistics. The production system was revised in full, with changes in sampling, weighting, use of register data, and a new questionnaire, several changes were made to modernize and streamline data collection. The dataset consists of all four quarters of the year, along with an annual weight. The annual weight corresponds to the quarterly weight divided by four. The dataset should be used for an annual average rather than a quarterly distribution. If a quarterly average is desired, separate datasets are available.