Mother-Daughter Comparisons in Household Surveys

The quality of the information in household surveys is always of concern to researchers and to policy makers who depend on their results. Although considered the “gold-standard” of household surveys in developing countries, the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) are not immune to errors in data, either due to respondent mis-reporting, interviewer mis-recording or deliberate falsification. These errors are thought to be more common in surveys where basic data are not known well, such as that of the dating of events and ages.
In quite a few households, more than one respondent is interviewed and many of these consist of mother-daughter pairs. Indeed, in the 2011 Benin DHS, there were 1488 mother-daughter pairs. A relatively unused technique in assessing data quality is to compare the reports of mothers and daughters. Direct comparison of birth dates, age, and educational attainment are available. When a sibling history is asked, the mother’s birth history information can be compared with the daughter’s sibling history to determine omission of births by either mother or daughter by survival status.