Underemployment: Social Fact or Socially Constructed Reality? *

This paper contrasts rural underemployment as a social fact with rural underemployment as a socially constructed reality. Using both survey data and in‐depth interviews with persistently underemployed rural residents, we were able to determine whether we were imposing our definition of reality on the interviewees. The data from the interviews largely demonstrated a correspondence between our objective definition of reality as defined by measures of underemployment and the informants' subjective interpretation of their employment situation. This procedure demonstrated that the underemployed had created their own subjective reality, which had become an objective reality: a socially created fact. A few cases, however, raised concerns about the extent to which that reality was widely shared because the interviewees' definitions did not correspond to our objective definitions or did not make sense in their own situations. Other interviewees' comments raised significant questions about the applicability of formal labor market concepts and measures, which tend to overlook the unique characteristics of rural labor markets such as uncompensated labor, self‐employment, and multiple job holding. Thus the indepth interviews provided conceptual checks on the extent to which we can impose our definitions of the situation on respondents' subjective reality.