Journal article
Forgetting to remember or remembering to forget: A study of the recall period length in health care survey questions
G Kjellsson, P Clarke, UG Gerdtham
Journal of Health Economics | Published : 2014
Abstract
Self-reported data on health care use is a key input in a range of studies. However, the length of recall period in self-reported health care questions varies between surveys, and this variation may affect the results of the studies. This study uses a large survey experiment to examine the role of the length of recall periods for the quality of self-reported hospitalization data by comparing registered with self-reported hospitalizations of respondents exposed to recall periods of one, three, six, or twelve months. Our findings have conflicting implications for survey design, as the preferred length of recall period depends on the objective of the analysis. For an aggregated measure of hospi..
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Awarded by Forskningsrådet för Arbetsliv och Socialvetenskap
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank Kjeld Moller Pedersen, Mirja Elisabeth Klojgaard, Jens Dietrichson, Anton Nilsson, Joanna Thorpe and two anonymous referees for comments on previous versions of this article. We are also grateful to seminar participants at the 2011 NHESG in Odense, 2012 HESG in Oxford and Lund University. Financial support from the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research (FAS) (dnr 2012-0419) is gratefully acknowledged. The Health Economics Program (HEP) at Lund University also receives core funding from FAS (dnr. 2006-1660), the Government Grant for Clinical Research ("ALF"), and Region Skane (Gerdtham).