Characterizing Occupations with Data from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles XIAOLING SHU,PI-LING FAN,* XIAOLI LI, AND MARGARET MOONEY MARINI University of Minnesota; and the *American Institutes for Research In this paper we use available data for the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) reconciled to the 1970 U.S. Census detailed occupational classification to create measures of DOT variables for the 1960 U.S. Census detailed occupational classification. Such measures are needed for cohort or other temporal comparisons employing data coded according to the 1960, 1970, and 1980 detailed occupational classifications and to merge DOT variables with micro-level data sets where occupation is coded using the 1960 detailed classification. We describe procedures used to reconcile the 1960 and 1970 detailed occupational classifications from information currently available and to compute measures of DOT variables for the 1960 classification from measures of DOT variables available for the 1970 classification. We then use confirmatory factor analysis to create summary indices of occupational characteristics for the 1960, 1970, and 1980 Census detailed occupational classification. We hypothesize a factor structure based on substantive conceptual criteria and test this hypothesized structure by estimating a series of modified and nested models. Our analysis produces measures of six occupational characteristics: substantive complexity, motor skill, physical perception, social skill, physical demands, and working conditions. r 1996 Academic Press, Inc. The Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) affords data useful for character- izing occupations in the U.S. labor force. It contains evaluation indices of the requirements, contents, and structures of occupations based on extensive on-site observation of jobs as they were actually performed. In the fourth edition of the DOT, which was published in December 1977, 12,099 occupations were evalu- ated on 44 characteristics grouped as seven clusters of variables: work functions, education and training times, aptitudes, temperaments, interests, physical de- This is a revised version of a paper presented at the Population Association of America Annual Meeting, Miami Beach, Florida, May, 1994. Work on the paper was supported by Grants K04- AG00296 and R01-AGO57515 from the National Institute on Aging, Grant R01-HD27598 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and funding from the College of Liberal Arts and the Graduate School of the University of Minnesota. We are grateful to Velda Graham for assistance in typing the paper. Address reprint requests to Dr. Xiaoling Shu, Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455-0412. SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH 25, 149–173 (1996) ARTICLE NO. 0007 149 0049-089X/96 $18.00 Copyright r 1996 by Academic Press, Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.