Symposium: New directions for health
Collecting retrospective data: Development of a reliable method and a pilot study of its use

https://doi.org/10.1016/0277-9536(95)00340-1Get rights and content

Abstract

The present paper argues that a need will remain for data which have been collected retrospectively. Recent developments in oral history and sociology are described to suggest a method of collecting retrospective data which may minimize recall bias. Pilot work is reported on the adaptation of the method for a study of chronic respiratory disease. The results of the pilot study proved promising. The technical properties of the measures appeared adequate. The results of the substantive analysis were consistent with existing knowledge and went beyond existing knowledge to suggest new areas of research. Ways of further validating the method are identified and its wider application discussed.

References (35)

  • C.J. Martin

    Monitoring maternity services by postal questionnaire: congruity between mothers' reports and their obstetric records

    Statistics Med.

    (1987)
  • M. Blaxter et al.

    Mothers and Daughters: A Three Generational Study of Health Attitudes and Behaviour

    (1982)
  • D. Sheridan

    Writing to the archive: mass-Observation as autobiography

    Sociology

    (1993)
  • T. Harrisson

    Living through The Blitz

    (1976)
  • H. Seldon et al.

    By Word of Mouth: Elite Oral History

    (1983)
  • D. Gallie

    The Social Change and Economic Life Initiative: An Overview

  • Cited by (129)

    • Forming a Critical Race Theory of Environmental Disaster: Understanding social meanings and health threat perception in the Flint Water Crisis

      2022, Journal of Environmental Management
      Citation Excerpt :

      Along these lines, the study's recruitment was broadly stratified across public venues across the city and sampling times were alternated, to improve the study's geographic reach in Flint and augment the concomitant probability of capturing the broader socioeconomic diversity of residents in the city. Second, multiple years had passed since the presumed initiation of the water crisis, and thus respondents' inventorying of health symptoms experienced pre and post-water source switch may have been subject to recall bias (Blane, 1996). However, this study's temporally-nuanced questions about the timing/frequency of potential symptoms (Brusco and Watts, 2015) may have facilitated more acute and precise recollection processes.

    • Measuring life course events and life histories

      2021, Handbook of Aging and the Social Sciences
    • Linked work lives: The interrelation of own and partner's employment history and their relationship with mental health in older European couples

      2020, Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics
      Citation Excerpt :

      From there, the other dimensions of the life course are reconstructed. This method was first developed as a self-completion questionnaire (Blane, 1996) and subsequently transformed into Computer Assisted Personal Interviews (CAPI) by the UK National Centre for Social Research (Scholes et al., 2009) and later adopted for SHARELIFE (Schröder, 2011). The data derived from these interviews includes detailed information on each previous job, including starting and ending dates and working hours, as well as information on episodes before the first job, between jobs and after the last job.

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text