CIP Canada 2011-ISCED 1997 and ISCED 1997-CIP Canada 2011 - Introduction to the concordance

The CIP Canada 2011-ISCED 1997 and ISCED 1997-CIP Canada 2011 concordances show the relationship between each 6-digit class of the Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) Canada 2011 and each 2-digit field of education of the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) 1997. The concordances provide a detailed mapping of the relationships between the two classifications.

The concordances were built from the example programs provided in CIP Canada 2011 to illustrate the content of each of its 6-digit classes. Each of these example programs was mapped to ISCED 1997, and the resulting code pairs were then summarized. This summary shows how the example programs for each CIP Canada 2011 class map into the fields of education of ISCED 1997 and, conversely, how the programs in each ISCED 1997 field of education map into the CIP Canada 2011 classes.

The concordances are of a type referred to as 'definitional', 'theoretical' or 'unweighted'. Definitional concordances allow users to see the relationships between the classes of the two systems. They are a convenient summary of the similarities and differences between two classifications. Definitional concordances differ from 'empirical', 'statistical' or 'weighted' concordances in that the latter include a measure of the practical significance of each of the class-to-class relationships.

These definitional concordances will be useful to users wanting to understand the conceptual relationships between the CIP Canada 2011 and ISCED 1997 classifications. The concordances will also provide a structural framework for users wanting to attach weights for conversion of historical time-series. In each case, the weights will be determined by the relative importance of each field of study within the specific data series being converted. Definitional concordances are also a means of effecting one-to-one conversions.