Adult female twins' recall of childhood social class and father's education: a validation study for public health research.
To assess recall of childhood socioeconomic position for public health research, the authors conducted a cross-sectional study of 352 adult women twin pairs enrolled in Examination II of the Kaiser Permanente Women Twins Study carried out in 1989-1990 in Oakland, California. Among twin pairs, 91% (95% confidence interval (CI) 89-94%) agreed on their father's educational level and 81% (95% CI 77-85%) on their childhood social class. Recall did not differ by adult socioeconomic position, zygosity, race/ethnicity, or age. Thus, epidemiologic studies can validly use retrospective data on childhood socioeconomic position to study its relation to adult health status.
Krieger
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N
Department of Health and Social Behavior, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA 02115, USA.
Okamoto
A
A
Selby
J V
JV
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D015982:Bias; D003430:Cross-Sectional Studies; D004522:Educational Status; D004812:Epidemiologic Methods; D005220:Fathers; D005260:Female; D006304:Health Status; D006801:Humans; D011939:Mental Recall; D008875:Middle Aged; D009790:Occupations; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012923:Social Class; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014427:Twins