“Are you sure you remembered the start-date correctly?” Survey Data Collection of Educational and Labour Pathways of Young Adults using Reactive Dependent Interviewing

Abstract

One of the challenges in the collection of life course-data in panel-design-surveys is to guarantee overall consistency of the data from different annual surveys. “Dependent Interviewing” is one possibility to reduce these difficulties, by drawing on data collected at previous waves to phrase questions or direct respondents through the Survey-instrument. For the eighth wave of the longitudinal survey TREE (Transitions from Education to Employment) forms of “Reactive Dependent Interviewing” were used to ensure the connection to existing episodes of previous waves. Based on findings from cognitive psychology, further modules of plausibilisation were integrated in the CATI-instrument: a visual presentation of life course-data on the screen for interviewers and consistency checks for gaps – periods without activity – as well as overlapping activities. This article presents results of the first analysis of survey raw data and describes the application and usefulness of the developed CATI-tools.