Volume 36, Number 3 (Summer) 2001
Beckett, Megan, Julie Da Vanzo, Narayan Sastry, Constantijn Panis, and Christine Peterson. 2001. "The Quality of Retrospective Data: An Examination of Long-Term Recall in a Developing Country." Journal of Human Resources 36(3):593-625.
The literature on reporting error provides insights into the quality of retrospective reports, particularly as it pertains to short-term recall. Less is understood about the generalizability of these findings to longer-term retrospective reports. We review studies analyzing the quality of retrospective reports in the Malaysian Family Life Surveys (MFLS), fielded in Peninsular Malaysia in 1976 and 1988, and conclude that many of the data quality problems found previously are present in the MFLS. We summarize this literature, place studies based on the MFLS within the context of the reporting error literature, and discuss implications for the design of future surveys.
The authors are researchers at the RAND Corporation. This research was supported by the National Institute on Child Health and Human Development under grant number P01 HD 28372 and the National Institute on Aging under grant number 1 T32 AG00244-03. The authors are grateful to Robert Moffitt, Robert Groves, and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. All figures in this article that are reproduced from other publications are done so with the permission of the publishers. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning October 2002 through September 2005 from Megan Beckett, RAND, 1700 Main Street, Santa Monica CA 90407 email to Megan_Beckett@rand.org .
© 2002 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
US ISSN 0022-166X