Our understanding of the size and characteristics of the alternative work force—freelance workers, contract workers, contingent workers, on-call workers, temporary workers, etc.—is severely limited by inadequate federal surveys. They are inadequate in several ways: lack of a clear and agreed upon taxonomy of work; questionable phrasing of questions; sporadic fielding of the surveys; and failure to take into account entirely new forms of work, often referred to as the gig economy, the platform economy, or the on-demand economy.   The U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is fielding its first Contingent Work Survey (CWS) in 10 years. This grant funds a project by Princeton economist Alan Krueger and Edward Freeland, Director of the Princeton Survey Research Center to identify and examine ways to improve the CWS questions in order to increase validity, reduce measurement error, and determine if new or additional categories of alternative work are needed.