Are reporting errors due to encoding limitations or retrieval failure? Surveys of child vaccination as a case study
✍ Scribed by Lisa Lee; Angela Brittingham; Roger Tourangeau; Gordon Willis; Pamela Ching; Jared Jobe; Steven Black
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1999
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 161 KB
- Volume
- 13
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0888-4080
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Surveys of childhood vaccinations are often highly inaccurate, due to parental misreporting. We conducted three experiments to examine the source of the inaccuracies. In Experiment 1, we provided parents with memory aids; these aids did little to improve reporting accuracy. Two further experiments asked whether parents forgot what they knew about their children's vaccinations, or whether they never knew the information. In Experiment 2 we surveyed parents both immediately and ten weeks after their child's medical visit. Accuracy was only slightly better than chance immediately afterwards; ten weeks later performance had not changed signi®cantly. Experiment 3 compared reports in both recall and recognition conditions. Although the recognition condition lowered the response burden on parents it did not produce more accurate reports. We conclude that low levels of accuracy in parental reports on vaccinations appear to re¯ect poor initial encoding rather than retrieval failure. Copyright