# How do I go from Labor Statistics results to generalities on the population?

I'm currently looking at survey results from the US bureau of labor statistics concerning hourly wages. With the raw survey data, I get different respondents who state how many hours they work in a week, along with the average pay, and some demographic data like age and sex.

How can I go from this information to making an educated guess about the amount of hours have been worked by the entire US population at a certain wage level, for example? Is there some way to "correlate" the values considering more than just a single parameter like age?

EDIT: I'm going to try and ask a more specific question then. Please forgive my complete lack of statistics knowledge:

Let's say I'm doing a survey about how much people earn in an hour. Based off of my survey, I know that , in my survey sample, men make about \$10 an hour, and women make \$8 an hour. I also know that in the same sample, people under 40 make \$7 an hour on average, and people over 40 make \$11 an hour.

Assuming that the population is 50/50 male/female, I can make an educated guess that the population , on average, makes \$9 an hour. Likewise, if %30 of the population is over 40, then I can guess that the population on average makes \$8.20 an hours

But how can I "combine" both of these information points? How can I consider both the sex and the age of the people to fit it to the population? Am I just supposed to do a weighted average or something?

• It is difficult to imagine a useful concise answer to this. See stats.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask including the advice "Your questions should be reasonably scoped. If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much." – Nick Cox Jul 7 '13 at 9:10
• ok, I tried to edit my question to be more specific. I fear that it might still be too general. – rtpg Jul 7 '13 at 9:41
• just use any survey that generalizes to the whole population instead of the working population.. you probably want the bls current population survey. to work with the microdata, start here – Anthony Damico Jul 7 '13 at 13:44
• @Anthony: but, CPS generalizes to the working age population not the whole US population; the survey focuses on the civilian noninstitutional population 16 years and over. – Metrics Jul 7 '13 at 14:03
• @metrics that is not correct. this page says, "the civilian noninstitutional population" kids don't get the employment questions, but there are child records - with nonzero weights. it's a household survey :) if you don't believe me, sum up the person-weights -- you'll get ~310 million not ~230 million – Anthony Damico Jul 7 '13 at 16:41