Reliability in wife’s reporting of husband's age in India: Empirical evidence from a large scale survey

Age is one of the most basic and important information collected in almost all demographic and health surveys. Most of the demographic researches on fertility, reproductive health and contraception focus on females of particular age group who are in their reproductive period. Important demographic indicators like fertility, contraception and mortality are estimated on the basis of reporting of the female respondents. This particular study makes an attempt in exploring the degree of matching and mismatch and its spatial variation in reporting of the age of the husbands by the wives in India. Multivariate analysis has been used to find the causal relationship beteen various socio-economic-demographic background and the mismatch in reporting of age of the husband. The present study analyses the concordance and discordance of the reporting of the husband's age as reported by the wife and by the husband separately by using a nationally representative sample size of 42185 couples. It is found that in India about three fifth of the cases (58 percent), there is mismatch(discordance) in reporting of husband's age as reported by the wife and the husband.