Due to new health care legislation, there was a desire to add detail to the answer categories for questions about employer and business size. 

Starting in Wave 11 of the SIPP 2008 panel, the variables EMPALL, EMPSIZE and EMPB were expanded from six to eight answer categories.  In the first ten waves of this panel, employer size questions were not asked again if a job had been held for at least two waves and the respondent reported that job (business) duties had not changed.  However, the appropriate questions were asked with the new categories for all in universe respondents with a  job or business during the reference period starting with Wave 11.  When previous wave data were available and imputation was necessary, imputation using the previous responses is utilized.  However, these data are not edited longitudinally.  Users should be aware that while some of the categories line up closely, the cutoff points for the answer categories are different between the waves.   For example, for a firm with exactly twenty-five employees they would answer Category 2 (25-99 employees) in Wave 10 and Category 2 (10-25 employees) in Wave 11, which are very different groupings.  Users should also be aware that in the public use data, the top-coded categories are no longer consistent across the three employer size variables.  In order to balance giving users as much detail as possible while preserving respondent privacy, the variables are in the following categories for Wave 11 and beyond:

TEMPSIZ1 and TEMPSIZ2:

1. Under 10
2. 10 to 25
3. 26 to 50
4. 51 to 100
5. 101 to 200
6. 201 to 500
7. 501 to 1000
8. More than 1000

TEMPALL1 and TEMPALL2:

1. Under 51
2. 51 to 100
3. 101 to 200
4. 201 to 500
5. 501 to 1000
6. More than 1000

TEMPB1 and TEMPB2:

1. Under 10
2. 10 to 25
3. More than 25