Meekers D
Committee on Population, National Research Council, Washington, DC 20418.
Demography. 1991 May;28(2):249-60.
In most African societies there is little motivation to remember dates of demographic events with the level of precision required in demographic surveys. Consequently it is common that the large majority of survey respondents can provide only the calendar year of occurrence or their age at the time of the event. The World Fertility Survey Group decided to handle the problem of poor date reporting by using a computer program to impute the missing information. This article illustrates the effect of these imputation procedures on cross-national differentials in the proportion of premarital first births in Benin, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, and Nigeria. The analysis demonstrates that the exceptionally low proportion of premarital first births in Ghana is an artifact of the imputation procedures.
在大多数非洲社会，人们几乎没有动力按照人口统计调查所要求的精确程度去记住人口事件的日期。因此，绝大多数调查受访者通常只能提供事件发生的公历年或事件发生时他们的年龄，这是很常见的。世界生育率调查小组决定通过使用计算机程序来估算缺失信息，以解决日期报告不佳的问题。本文阐述了这些估算程序对贝宁、喀麦隆、科特迪瓦、加纳和尼日利亚婚前首胎比例的跨国差异所产生的影响。分析表明，加纳婚前首胎比例异常低是估算程序造成的假象。
