Data Quality: Three Examples of Consistency Across SHARE and SHARELIFE Data

SHARELIFE is the third wave of SHARE and constitutes its retrospective survey focusing on the life histories of the European population aged 50 and over across 14 European countries. As any retrospective survey, SHARELIFE is subject to memory bias, which can present serious problem in the analysis of retrospective data. Given the evidence-based increased risk of recall bias in the retrospective surveys and given the length of the recall period covered by the SHARELIFE survey (i.e. at least 50 years), this paper aims at assessing the quality of the SHARELIFE data by investigating (i) the extent to which SHARELIFE respondents remember past events incorrectly; and (ii) the extent to which this recall bias may vary by type of individual characteristics (e.g., gender, education level, childhood background, health status). In that effort, this paper focuses on three variables, namely year of stopping working, date of birth of the first (still alive) child and date of the last marriage for cohabitating respondents.