Survey of Independent Contractors (2017)

We conducted an online survey of self-employed workers and independent contractors in the U.S. to better understand their working conditions and employment policy preferences. The purpose of the survey was to identify which potential employment benefits are most valued by self-employed workers. Interviews for the survey were conducted between Monday, April 24 and Wednesday, April 27, 2017.  The Qualtrics national online panel was used to identify a sample of U.S. adults currently in the labor force. The panel currently has 4 million members who are recruited primarily through online ads.

The initial screener questions for the interview were presented to 10,368 Qualtrics panel members. Of these, 82 were found to have been from IP addresses outside of the U.S.  Among the remaining 10,286 panel members, 894 indicated they did not have a job in the week prior to the survey and 252 indicated their only work in the week before the survey was completing online questionnaires.  The remaining 9,140 panel members were then randomly presented with one of two versions of question that asked about self-employment in the week preceding the survey.  An additional 581 responses were found to be not qualified for a variety of reasons including age, employment status, excessive response speeds and nonsensical answers to survey questions. The resulting file has responses from 8,559 qualified panel members.