Dear Dennis,
I am interested in your project on Human memory as we (Michel Poulain, Benoît Riandey, Jean-Marie Firdion and me) undertook An assessment of the validity of retrospective survey data: in order to examine the memory problems encountered while making a retrospective life history survey: we compared the results from register data, a survey made with the husband and his wife first separately then together. We had also a very interesting study made by Nadia Auriat, a psychologist, on Les défaillances de la mémoire humaine. You will find here the main results of this work and I will be happy to have your advice on these results: they show that even if errors in the dating of past events are frequent, apparently they do not affect their logical sequence, or only very slightly so.
Daniel
Why use husband and wife pairs? to assess what? past memories, shared memories, family memories, husband and wife memories, husband and wife memories about childen?
Please tell me your study objective in terms of what you want to do in terms of "human memory" and/or "human memory assessment" and the methodology you intend to employ.
Dennis
Dennis Mazur
I undertook in 1981 a retrospective survey asking to a representative sample of French people, born between 1911 and 1936, the main events they knew in their family, career and migration histories. This survey permitted to understand how an individual behaviour can be described as a complex stochastic process and had lead to many improvements in the understanding of this process. I wrote with Eva Lelièvre a book on Event history analysis in demography which has also been published in French and in Spanish. A growing number of such surveys are now undertaken in the whole world.
However it was necessary to test the reliability of data collected with this method. We undertook two surveys in Belgium the first test on 50 couples was conducted by Duchêne and Poulain in Belgium in 1982. The second one conducted by Poulain, Riandey and Firdion permitted to have 445 couples interviewed with their Population Register data. It was important to compare the memory of men and women as the data confirmed that women give more reliable data on family events and remember moves with more accuracy than their husband. The event history analysis of these data shows that the logical sequence of events is correctly memorized, and that the errors only form a kind of background noise. The memory seems to be reliable where the analysis needs it to be.
You will have more details on these results in the papers I joined to the previous message.
Reference
Courgeau D. and Lelièvre E. (1992). Event history analysis in demography. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
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