Retrospective Versus Panel Reports of First Employment in the Life Courses of U.S. women

• In Event: 576 - Section on Methodology Paper Session. Integrating Multiple Methodologies into Data Collection and Analysis

Abstract

This study investigates accuracy of reporting on young women’s first employment, comparing retrospective reports in the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) and the first wave of the 2004 and 2008 panels of the Survey of Income Program Participation (SIPP) to annual panel reports in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97). We evaluate differences in recall accuracy by time elapsed between period reported on and interview. We also evaluate differences in reporting accuracy by race/ethnicity, nativity and mother’s education, juxtaposed with the salience and complexity of each group’s employment histories. We find relatively small, but statistically-significant differences between reporting in the SIPP and NSFG versus the NLSY97, in a direction that suggests some forgetting of episodes of first job or employment spell of at least six months duration in retrospective reports. We also find some evidence that more complex and less salient (part-time) employment experiences result in more recall errors: Young women with a mother who did not graduate from high school and young women with a college-graduate mother had both the highest proportions of their early employment in part-time jobs and the largest magnitudes of error in recalling first stable job or employment spell. We found no indications of substantial race/ethnic differences in reporting. Overall, our results are reassuring with respect to the ability of surveys to capture accurately summary indicators of first stable employment in retrospective questions.

Authors

• Rachel Shattuck, University of Maryland-College Park

• Michael S Rendall, University of Maryland-College Park