Retrospective Reports of Family Structure

Abstract

We investigate response inconsistencies in a national panel of young women who were asked the following widely used retrospective survey question once in 1968 and once in 1972: "With whom were you living when you were 14 years old? We find a substantial amount of response inconsistency between the two administrations of the question, and this inconsistency is shown to be related to whether or not the respondent said in 1968 that at age 14 she was living with both parents. We suggest that some young people live in households with a frequently changing composition, so that there may be no single, true answer to the question for them. Others, we hypothesize, change their responses to a more socially desirable category as time passes. After reviewing evrdence for these hypotheses, we show that, despite the inconsistency, the 1968 and 1972 questions lead to similar conclusions in multivariate research when the responses are collapsed into a few categories. We conclude that the question is still useful as a crude indicator of past family life, but that more refined measures are needed in order to explain the influence of childhood family composition on events in adulthood.