ESENER-PSR 2009 - European Agency for Safety and Health at Work

such as the French SIRENE directory are still classified according to national systems (here:
the French NAF codes).
Nevertheless, none of these alternative national or international codes presented problems
regarding the sampling and weighting of the ESENER since all these alternative systems of
codification are well adaptable to NACE. There is not always a 100%-congruency with NACE,
but existing differences are confined to very fine levels of classification (third or fourth digit of
NACE). In the new NACE version, compatibility of these alternative systems of codification
has even further improved.
A more problematic issue will be the codification of addresses taken from either the Yellow- or
the White-Pages telephone books or other address-bases which are based on telephoneregisters.
Such registers were used in a couple of countries for addresses of the Public Sector.
For these establishments of NACE Rev. 1.1. L / Rev. 2 O, the Yellow- or White-Pages entries
(with topics such “municipalities”, “police-stations” or the like) had to be converted manually
into NACE-codes.
The congruency of the sectors of activity contained in the various address-sources with the
NACE-codification is extremely important for this survey, as it was decided not to integrate any
question about the kind of activity carried out in the surveyed establishments. Instead, the
codes of activity as contained in the address-sources had to be added to the questionnaires.
This procedure saved valuable interviewing time and can in most cases be supposed to be
more accurate than asking a lengthy and difficult question about the establishments’ type of
activity to the respondents.
While the compatibility of the alternative classification systems with NACE is unproblematic,
the most recent revision of the NACE codification itself constituted a major challenge for the
sampling and weighting of the ESENER: Until the end of 2007, the NACE code had been
applied in its first revision of 1990 (NACE Rev. 1). Since 1 st January 2008, however, a new
NACE version (NACE Rev. 2) has come into effect which significantly differs from the former
version NACE Rev. 1 even on the 1-digit level.
The national statistical offices of the EU member states are obliged to use the new NACE
version since the beginning of 2008 for a series of official economic statistics. Business
address registers and statistics on the distribution of establishments by sectors of activity have
however often not yet been adapted to the new NACE classification.
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