Comparing Data Quality of Fertility and First Sexual Intercourse Histories
评估女性受访者报告的生育间隔和首次性行为年龄两个人口学变量的数据质量，发现不同调查间生育间隔数据质量差异不大，但首次性行为年龄存在回忆偏差。
This paper evaluates the data quality of two demographic variables in light of hypotheses on respondent recall from the literature on survey methodology. An emerging consensus in this literature is that recall of the timing of an event declines with recall duration unless the dating of an event is frequently rehearsed. We provide empirical evidence consistent with this hypothesis by assessing the quality of demographic data on two event history variables as supplied by female respondents. A first outcome concerns the interval between a first and second birth. We assess examine birth intervals using birth registration data from the Vital Statistics on Natality (VSN) and individual-level survey data from the 1990 June Current Population Survey (CPS), the 1979-93 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), and the 1988 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG). Overall, we find relatively little variation in the quality of birth interval data across these four surveys, with onie exception-CPS data in which responses have been allocated. A second demographic variable is age at first sexual intercourse. We engage in several analyses of this variable. First, we use NLSY data to analyze discrepan