Center for Demographic Research, UCLouvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK.
Popul Health Metr. 2023 Jul 18;21(1):8. doi: 10.1186/s12963-023-00307-9.
Full birth histories (FBHs) are a key tool for estimating fertility and child mortality in low- and middle-income countries, but they are lengthy to collect. This is not desirable, especially for rapid turnaround surveys that ought to be short (e.g., mobile phone surveys). To reduce the length of the interview, some surveys resort to truncated birth histories (TBHs), where questions are asked only on recent births.
We used 32 Malaria Indicator Surveys that included TBHs from 18 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Each set of TBHs was paired and compared to an overlapping set of FBHs (typically from a standard Demographic and Health Survey). We conducted a variety of data checks, including a comparison of the proportion of children reported in the reference period and a comparison of the fertility and mortality estimates.
Fertility and mortality estimates from TBHs are lower than those based on FBHs. These differences are driven by the omission of events and the displacement of births backward and out of the reference period.
TBHs are prone to misreporting errors that will bias both fertility and mortality estimates. While we find a few significant associations between outcomes measured and interviewer's characteristics, data quality markers correlate more consistently with respondent attributes, suggesting that truncation creates confusion among mothers being interviewed. Rigorous data quality checks should be put in place when collecting data through this instrument in future surveys.
完整生育史（FBHs）是估计中低收入国家生育率和儿童死亡率的重要工具，但收集过程冗长。这并不理想，尤其是对于那些应该简短的快速调查（例如，移动电话调查）。为了缩短访谈时间，一些调查采用了截断生育史（TBHs），其中只询问最近的生育情况。
我们使用了来自撒哈拉以南非洲 18 个国家的 32 项疟疾指标调查中的 TBHs。每一组 TBHs 都与一组重叠的 FBHs 进行配对和比较（通常来自标准的人口与健康调查）。我们进行了各种数据检查，包括比较参考期内报告的儿童比例以及比较生育和死亡率估计值。
TBHs 得出的生育率和死亡率估计值低于基于 FBHs 的估计值。这些差异是由事件的遗漏以及出生时间的后移和超出参考期造成的。
TBHs 容易出现错误报告，这将对生育率和死亡率估计产生偏差。虽然我们发现了一些与所测结果和访谈者特征之间的显著关联，但数据质量指标与受访者特征更一致地相关，这表明截断会导致受访者混淆。在未来的调查中，通过这种工具收集数据时，应采取严格的数据质量检查措施。
