As the country struggles to recover from the impact of the Great Recession, one much discussed and analyzed economic measure has been the number of Americans who are unemployed.  NPR News and the Kaiser Family Foundation partnered on the Long-Term Unemployed Survey to better describe the experiences and views of two groups of individuals: the long-term unemployed (those who have been out of work for a year or more and would prefer to be working) and the long-term underemployed (those who are working part-time and have been without full-time work for over one year, but are interested in full-time employment).  

NPR is reporting the findings in the series, “Still No Job: Over A Year Without Enough Work,” which will continue throughout the remainder of the year across all newsmagazines and at NPR.org.

The survey is part of a series of polling projects about health-related issues by NPR and the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.  Representatives of the two organizations worked together to develop the survey questionnaire and to analyze the results, with NPR maintaining sole editorial control over its broadcasts and online reporting relating to the survey results.  The survey research team included Mollyann Brodie, Ph.D., Liz Hamel, Bianca DiJulio, Sarah Cho, and Theresa Boston from the Kaiser Family Foundation; and Joe Neel, Vickie Walton, Steve Drummond, Uri Berliner and Anne Gudenkauf from NPR.

The survey was conducted via landline and cellular telephone Oct. 17-Nov. 16, 2011 among a nationally representative random sample of adults ages 18-64 who met the definition of long-term unemployed (N=413), long-term underemployed (N=300), or full-time employed (N=757).  The margin of sampling error for the total sample of un- and underemployed and for full-time workers is +/-5 percentage points; for results based on subsets of respondents the margin of sampling error is somewhat higher.

Findings (.pdf)

Toplines (.pdf)

 

Link to NPR Series of Stories