Page 112 - Special Topic Session (STS) - Volume 2

STS463 Noraliza M.A. et al.
1
exception for the year 1991 and 1994 . LFS also housed the supplements of
other data collection modules i.e. Salaries & Wages Survey, Migration Survey
and Survey of Manpower in the Informal Sector.
Considering the overarching role of the labour supply statistics within the
national labour market information system in Malaysia, it is important that LFS
as the primary source of these statistics is assessed objectively; and practical
and realistic strategies is proposed to improve the production of labour supply
statistics in the country.

2. The Labour Force Survey in Malaysia
The LFS in Malaysia remained as one of the key statistics in the labour
market information framework. Initially conducted for the region of Peninsular
Malaysia in 1974, the nationally representative survey took off in 1982. Due to
the growing demands for regular and timely statistics, the survey frequency
was increased to quarterly interval in 1998; and subsequently monthly survey
took off since 2004.
Pen-and Paper Interviewing (PAPI) approach is employed for Malaysia’s
LFS in which trained enumerators visited households in selected living quarters
(LQs) to collect demographic particulars of all household members and
detailed labour force particulars of all members aged 15 years and over. A
total of twenty-five per cent of the monthly allocated samples are repeated
for the next quarter using Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI).
The survey population is defined to cover persons who live in private LQs and
hence excludes persons residing in institutional LQs such as hotels, hostels,
hospitals, prisons, boarding houses, and construction work site. The sample
for LFS is drawn from Malaysia Statistical Address Registry (MSAR) which is
made up addresses of LQs, composed into Enumeration Blocks (EBs) of 80 to
120 LQs each. The core reference material used to define concepts, definitions
and classifications are as proposed by the ILO through the conventions and
recommendations; and guidelines.
The estimates for the specific characteristics in the survey population are
acquired through inflating the sample by the combination of adjusted weight
and external weight. The adjusted weight is used to adjust for non-response
in the survey, while the external weight i.e. the up-to-date population
estimates is divided into specific characteristics of state, sex, age group,
citizenship and ethnic group and compared to the sample of similar
characteristics. On the basis of ratios of these distributions, correction factors
or weights are derived which, when applied to the sample cases, make the

1 The absence of LFS for the two years was due to resources constraint as the organisation
prioritized the implementation of Population and Housing Census in 1991 and the Agriculture
Census in 1994.
101 | I S I W S C 2 0 1 9