The Quality of Retrospective Reports in the Malaysian Family Life Survey

Abstract

In this paper, we review studies that have evaluated the quality of retrospective data collected in the 1976-77 and 1988 Malaysian Family Life Surveys. The evaluations considered the internal consistency of the data, expected relationships between variables, comparisons with external contemporaneous data sources, and analyses of replicate reports. We summarize what has been learned about data quality by subject area. The topics include: marriage; fertility and fertility-related events, such as contraception, miscarriages, birthweight, and breastfeeding; infant and child mortality; education; housing; earnings; and migration. We conclude that accuracy is greater for qualitative reports than for amounts and durations, events associated with major life changes are recalled better, and the quality of reports is greater for more educated respondents and more recent events. We discuss the implications of these findings for research and for the design of future surveys.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Dec 01, 1999
Accession Number
ADA373377

Entities

People

  • Christine B Peterson
  • Constantijn Panis
  • Julie Davanzo
  • Megan Beckett
  • Narayan Sastry

Organizations

  • RAND Corporation

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Accuracy
  • Breastfeeding
  • Census
  • Conformity
  • Data Analysis
  • Descriptive Analytics
  • Education
  • Families (Human)
  • Fertility
  • Information Science
  • Pregnancy Complications
  • Social Sciences
  • Standards
  • Statistics
  • Surveys
  • Urban Areas
  • Vital Statistics

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