Hi,
I have a problem regarding matching of longitudinal data in my field of research (university students). We have a Person-Code for matching data measured in different time points, but 30%+ of students fail to give the same code twice...
Is anyone with a simple, yet sufficient Person-Code-Solution out there?
Thanks in advance,
Regards,
Daniel Rehfeldt
Use codes that don't change:
Mother's first letter of her name,
day of birthday,
father's month of birth.
last digit of cell phone
For our study we had diverse group of international students so matching their time they moved to China AND their nationality was a back-up check
to add to Alexander Scott English : As far as birthdays are concerned, I would not recommend choosing someone else's birthday (mother, father in most cases).
We do it in the following way:
Frist two letters of your mother's first name
Frist two letters of your father's first name
Your birthday
Best
Marcel
Good idea! Perhaps this could also be culturally dependent. It worked well with our samples =) We managed to retain 80 to 85% of the people over 2 years. I think the tip to return to the same classrooms to collect in-person data. If doing online, while it may be easier to process, it's hard to ensure matching.
Unfortunately, we have made the same experience in several studies. We have used code similar to what has been proposed above. Indeed, one might think that code that does not change solves the problem but that appears not to be true. A relevant number of test persons still simply does not remember, does not understand or, maybe, does not want to be recognized. By the way, code that refers to the father‘s name, birthday, etc. is always a problem because there are always several individuals that simply do not know their father - sad but true.
We always try to work with a code and reconstruct data pairs also by using demographics like gender, etc. That always helps to find some more complete data sets. However, in my experience there is no such a thing as a perfect code that solves the problem.
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