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The Relationship History Calendar: Improving the Scope and Quality of Data on Youth Sexual Behavior

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Demography

Abstract

Most survey data on sexual activities are obtained via face-to-face interviews, which are prone to misreporting of socially unacceptable behaviors. Demographers have developed various private response methods to minimize social desirability bias and improve the quality of reporting; however, these methods often limit the complexity of information collected. We designed a life history calendar—the Relationship History Calendar (RHC)—to increase the scope of data collected on sexual relationships and behavior while enhancing their quality. The RHC records detailed, 10-year retrospective information on sexual relationship histories. The structure and interview procedure draw on qualitative techniques, which could reduce social desirability bias. We compare the quality of data collected with the RHC with a standard face-to-face survey instrument through a field experiment conducted among 1,275 youth in Kisumu, Kenya. The results suggest that the RHC reduces social desirability bias and improves reporting on multiple measures, including higher rates of abstinence among males and multiple recent sexual partnerships among females. The RHC fosters higher levels of rapport and respondent enjoyment, which appear to be the mechanisms through which social desirability bias is minimized. The RHC is an excellent alternative to private response methods and could potentially be adapted for large-scale surveys.

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Notes

  1. There is no “gold standard” against which to compare respondent self-reports of sexual behavior to determine their quality (Catania et al. 1990; Fenton et al. 2001). Therefore, our strategy is to use data collected from a conventional face-to-face survey approach as the benchmark against which to compare reporting on the RHC.

  2. See Axinn et al. (1999), Axinn and Pearce (2006), and Freedman et al. (1988) for further illustrations of life history calendars.

  3. DHS calendars generally collect five-year monthly information on pregnancies/births, contraceptive use and source, reason for contraceptive discontinuation, and marriage/union status. Age (by month) at sexual debut, frequency of sexual intercourse, the type and number of sexual partners, consistency of condom use, and how these characteristics and behaviors vary within each relationship are not recorded (Ali et al. 2003). All of this information, with the exception of contraceptive source and reason for discontinuation, is included on the RHC. Relationship information is included in calendars designed by Yoshihama et al. (2005) and Martyn (2009) as well, although information is collected at yearly intervals and relationship dimensions are fairly limited.

  4. This referencing process is believed to map onto the structure of autobiographical memory to result in higher-quality retrospective reports than standard survey questioning techniques (Anderson and Conway 1993; Belli 1998). For example, filling out calendar information for the period “year in school” could jog the respondent’s specific memory about the first romantic or sexual partner (known as parallel retrieval), and thinking about the first partner may prompt memory about a later partner (sequential retrieval within domain) (Belli et al. 2007).

  5. An index for economic status was constructed from 14 items relating to household assets, housing characteristics, and utilities and infrastructure. Principal components analysis was used to generate standardized weight scores, which were summed to produce index scores. These were then ranked and divided into wealth quintiles.

  6. In the RHC sample, 12.9% of respondents commenced sexual activity prior to the 10-year reference period.

  7. We compensated respondents for the time and effort required to complete the RHC and SPQ interviews. While compensation may in itself be an inducement for more truthful reporting of sexual experiences, funds were applied equally and should not lead to differential reporting across instruments.

  8. These and all other results not shown are available from the first author upon request.

  9. Interviewer effects could arise if some interviewers performed better than others, for example. If these interviewers happened to complete more RHC interviews, then the RHC could produce improved reporting because it reduces social desirability bias and/or because the best interviewers administered it.

  10. Interviewers covered each enumeration area in teams of two to four, each with at least one male and one female interviewer. It was often the case that a female interviewer, for example, was interviewing a respondent when a male team member selected the next eligible respondent, who was female. In this case, the research team proceeded as follows: if a same-sex interviewer was not available, respondents were asked if they felt comfortable talking to an opposite-sex interviewer and, if so, were asked to proceed with the interview. If not, an appointment was made for a same-sex interviewer to return at a later time. In total, 18.6% of female respondents were interviewed by males, and 23.5% of male respondents were interviewed by females.

  11. Given that the principal investigators, study director, and supervisors encouraged interviewers to complete at least four questionnaires per interviewer per day in the field, it appears that when time was available at the end of each day, interviewers—particularly female interviewers—completed an additional SPQ interview.

  12. Although the numbers of lifetime and recent sexual partners are bounded at zero, for ease of exposition, we use the term “left tail” to refer to reports in the lower ends of the distributions.

  13. Table 2 shows that approximately 85% of young women aged 18–24 have initiated sexual activity. In addition, among younger adolescent girls (ages 15–19) in Kisumu, Mensch et al. (2003) estimated that approximately 45% had had sex.

  14. Because a small number of respondents were divorced, separated, or widowed, we constructed a dichotomous measure of ever married as the control variable for marital status.

  15. One alternative explanation for the lower numbers of lifetime sexual partners reported by males on the RHC in Tables 2 and 3 is that, given the great amount of detail being collected on each relationship, male respondents may have been under the impression that the researchers were primarily interested in more serious types of relationships on the RHC or they intended to reveal details about more serious ones only. We stressed during training that all types of partners should be reported on the RHC and SPQ. In addition, we find that males reported more casual and other types of recent sexual partners (one-night stands and commercial sex workers) on the RHC (38.8% had at least one of these types) than on the SPQ (28.0%), which helps rule out this explanation. Females also reported more of these less serious types of partners on the RHC (13.7%) than on the SPQ (11.7%).

  16. For male respondents, we find that the expected number of lifetime partners is 0.09 higher for those interviewed by a male compared with a female interviewer, and the expected number of partners in the last year is 0.15 larger when interviewed by a male, both of which are statistically significant. For male respondents, a male interviewer also increased the odds of reporting ever having sex by 1.9 times compared with a female interviewer, which is significant at the .10 level.

  17. Greater fatigue among male than among female respondents is also supported by the finding that 10 of the 12 respondents who did not report details of all of their relationships in the last 10 years on the RHC because of lack of time were male.

  18. Our conclusion that fatigue and recall error are not major explanations for differential reporting of the actual numbers of sexual partners across instruments does not imply that they do not affect retrospective reporting or that the RHC does not have the potential to reduce these types of error for other measures. The conversational flexibility of the RHC interview combined with the use of effective retrieval cues could motivate and aid respondents to recall more precise timing of relationship transitions and more details of relationship dimensions than the SPQ format, for example (Belli and Callegaro 2009; Belli et al. 2007). Alternatively, fatigue could result in fewer relationship dimensions being reported in detail on the RHC.

  19. Results in Table 4 are similar in terms of significance levels if measures are constructed dichotomously, with the category very/significant coded 1 and somewhat/moderate and not/none coded 0.

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Acknowledgments

Funding for this research was provided by a grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (R21-HD 053587), as well as supplementary funding from the Population Studies and Training Center, Department of Sociology, and UTRA at Brown University; the African Population and Health Research Center; and the Population Research Center at the University of Chicago. The authors gratefully acknowledge the role of research team members Caroline Kabiru, Rachel Goldberg, Hongwei Xu, Aidan Jeffery, Rena Otieno, Salome Wawire, Alena Davidoff-Gore, and Rohini Mathur. We thank the data management staff at the African Population and Health Research Center; Michael White, Catherine Andrezjewski, Holly Reed, and Justin Buszin for information regarding calendar design; Hongwei Xu and Sanyu Mojola for research assistance; and Kelley Smith for editorial assistance. We also thank the interviewers and respondents in Kisumu. Rachel Goldberg, Dennis Hogan, Caroline Kabiru, Kaivan Munshi, and Michael White provided helpful feedback on the paper.

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  1. Department of Sociology and Population Studies and Training Center, Brown University, Box 1916, Providence, RI, 02912, USA

    Nancy Luke

  2. Department of Sociology, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Shelley Clark

  3. African Institute for Development Policy, Nairobi, Kenya

    Eliya M. Zulu

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Luke, N., Clark, S. & Zulu, E.M. The Relationship History Calendar: Improving the Scope and Quality of Data on Youth Sexual Behavior. Demography 48, 1151–1176 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-011-0051-2

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