Percentage distribution data may not give a good indication of whether one group is more vulnerable to a certain problem, e.g. unemployment, than others.

In Example 2 earlier, degree holders made up the largest group among unemployed residents. Does this mean that degree holders are the most vulnerable to unemployment?

 

It turned out that the answer is no, as the high proportion of degree holders among the unemployed residents merely reflect the high proportion of degree holders in the resident labour force.

 

 

To compare the vulnerability of unemployment of the different education groups, it would be more appropriate to use the concept of incidence rather than distribution.

 

For the case of unemployment, the incidence measure is the unemployment rate, which expresses the number of unemployed in each education group to the labour force (employed plus unemployed) in the same education group. This normalises the number of unemployed persons in the various education groups against their different labour force sizes. As shown in the table below, degree holders in fact had the lowest unemployment rate among the education groups. Hence, they were least vulnerable to being unemployed in June 2010.