Abstract:
This paper performs an evaluation of the data collected in the sixth wave of the BHPS on childhood family structure. After comparing such data with a large number of studies using external sources, we find that the BHPS overestimates the proportion of people who report an experience of life in a non-intact family during childhood by about 12%. Although an explanation based on recall error that deteriorates with the age of the BHPS informants is possible, this overestimation is likely to be accounted for by non-ignorable attrition that may affect most of the comparison studies using longitudinal data. Conversely, comparisons with other independent measurements from the BHPS itself reveal that the wave-6 data underestimate the proportion of young people having experienced part of their childhood in a non-intact family by about 8%. The probability of disagreement between these two statistics is strongly associated with poor interview characteristics, which may affect the comparison measure more than the wave-6 measure. In general, however, despite such differences, there is a substantial degree of similarity between the family structure information collected in the sixth wave of the BHPS and the host of highly diverse records against which it has been compared.
