The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure
Occupational coding – the PST system
The Primary, Secondary, Tertiary system of occupational coding has been developed by Professor E.A. Wrigley in conjunction with Ms Ros. Davies. It is being used to code all the occupational data collected on The occupational structure of Britain c.1379-1911 project.
It is important to note that the system is subject to change over time and anyone wishing to use the system for coding occupational data or to make comparisons with other datasets coded to PST should pay close attention to the version numbers of particular releases of PST. The current version at the time of writing is PST April 2010.
A paper describing the system and the analytical logic behind is available below. Note that the current version of PST at the time this paper was written was Feb2010. The system categories all occupations according to a four point system. A definition table, which currently (April 2010) contains 1,635 distinct occupational groupings and the four point codes is available below. A dictionary containing 2.614 distinct occupations currently in the system and its PST code is also available below. A look-up table containing 31,991 variant spellings is also available below. This look-up table can be used directly for coding occupational datasets into the set of distinct occupations in the dictionary which can in turn be used to code the dataset into PST. This constitutes a powerful and fast way of coding occupational datasets into PST. Most users are likely to find they can code the great bulk of their occupational datasets into PST very quickly using these resources.