Interviewing Children about Their Families: A Note on Data Quality

Primary school children have sometimes been considered too immature, inarticulate, or shy to serve as useful sources of data on their families. We use information from a study of 195 children aged 8-9 and 207 adolescents aged 15-16 to assess and compare the quality of data provided by respondents in the two age groups. Three sources are used: interviewers' ratings of children's behavior during the interview, the quantity of missing data across interview items, and the percentage of agreements between parents and children on 10 relatively objective family characteristics. These three sources all lead to the conclusion that the quality of data is significantly higher for adolescents than for primary school children. However, the quality of data for primary school children is high in absolute terms. We believe these findings are encouraging for other researchers who wish to interview children about their families.