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Can We Trust Older People’s Statements on Their Childhood Circumstances? Evidence from SHARELIFE

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Abstract

This paper analyzes the quality of subjective assessments related to childhood circumstances when provided by old-age individuals. Early life events are important for social scientists to predict individual outcomes later in life and because of data restrictions, retrospective assessments are often used. Nevertheless, there is widespread skepticism on the ability of old-age respondents to recall with good accuracy events occurred many years ago. Using data from the survey of health, aging and retirement in Europe (SHARE), we assess the internal and external consistency of some measures of childhood health and socio-economic status. Our study suggests that overall respondents seem to remember fairly well their health status and their living conditions between age 0–15. Applying a cross-country comparison (13 European countries), we analyse within survey responses with external historical data (e.g., GDP per capita in period 1926–1956) at a country and cohort level. Our results should mitigate some of the doubts on retrospective data collection and promote their use for research purposes.

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Notes

  1. Self-reported health is measured on a 1–5 scale with 1 for excellent health and 5 for poor health and we use data from SHARELIFE (2008). For illustration purposes we recode it and define good health as “very good or excellent” and bad health as “good, fair or poor”.

  2. An alternative explanation might be that the effect of memory disappears because memory is a function of age and education. However, as aforementioned, this variable has a very large support and we found evidence of substantial variation in the memory test also within age and education groups. In particular, we regressed the variable memory on a cubic polynomial in age, education and other baseline controls including country fixed effects (results are available upon request). As expected, we found that this large set of controls is able to explain less than 30 % of the total variation in the memory test.

  3. The same test has been performed using the whole panel (respondents present in wave 1, 2 and 3). However, we decided to drop it from the analysis since selective attrition might influence the goodness of the test. In any case the Wald test for the equality of coefficients between W1–W2 and W1–W3 lead to the rejection of the null hypothesis for women, while the evidence is mixed for men. Results are available upon request.

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Acknowledgments

This paper uses data from SHARE release 2.3.1. SHARE data collection in 2004–2007 was primarily funded by the European Commission through its 5th and 6th framework programmes (project numbers QLK6-CT-2001- 00360; RII-CT- 2006-062193; CIT5-CT-2005-028857). Additional funding by the US National Institute on Aging (Grant No. U01 AG09740-13S2; P01 AG005842; P01 AG08291; P30 AG12815; Y1-AG-4553-01; OGHA 04-064; R21 AG025169) as well as by various national sources is gratefully acknowledged (see http://www.share-project.org for a full list of funding institutions).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. European Commission - Joint Research Centre, Ispra, VA, Italy

    Enkelejda Havari

  2. Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI), Lugano, Switzerland

    Fabrizio Mazzonna

  3. Munich Center for the Economic of Ageing (MEA), Munich, Germany

    Fabrizio Mazzonna

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  1. Enkelejda Havari
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  2. Fabrizio Mazzonna
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Correspondence to Fabrizio Mazzonna.

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Havari, E., Mazzonna, F. Can We Trust Older People’s Statements on Their Childhood Circumstances? Evidence from SHARELIFE. Eur J Population 31, 233–257 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10680-014-9332-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10680-014-9332-y

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