EDIT: turns out I'm wrong about the nuance of this error so adjusting the below text... That's because this error isn't an error due to some analyst doing some

EDIT: turns out I'm wrong about the nuance of this error so adjusting the below text... That's because this error isn't an error due to some analyst doing something wrong. What is happening is that people are being asked questions about their employment status and are answering in a way that gets them classified as "absent" instead of "unemployed". It's not really clear from the report if this is due to interviewer training or the way questions are being answers. Regardless, we call this kind of misattribution a `misclassification error`. To avoid introducing even worse errors into the data (namely, selection bias), the analyst has to just assume that the people who answered wrong, in fact answered correctly (this is called Intention to Treat Analysis [0]. What the BLS report is stating is that if they did treat those who said "absent" as "unemployed" you would see an extra 3% unemployed. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intention-to-treat_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intention-to-treat_analysis