THE RELIABILITY OF SOME SURVEY DATA / A CASE STUDY OF FAMILY PLANN ING IN EGYPT

Abstract

In addition to vital systems, service statistics, and census, surveys have become one of the major sources for fertility and family planning data needed for decision-making to formulate future population policies. This has resulted in the widespread of surveys and increased demographers' interest in the assessment of their reliability, particularly, when they are carried out in developing countries with poor standards of education. Consequently, many reliability studies have been carried out in developing countries and the United States. Some of these were concerned with the internal consistency of the data, while the others were concerned with the comparison of survey results with other sources of information. However, during the last two decades, the use of post-enumeration survey in assessing the reliability of survey data has received much interest from scientists. In this approach, they distinguished between the respondent's and the interviewer's reliability. Most of the interest was directed to the first type of reliability since the other type can be controled through high levels of training.