Understanding Society User Support

Hi Gundi,

Many thanks for your detailed and timely reply. Just a couple of things to clarify. You said that lnprnt is asked of men only. Is there any way to find out if a woman had biological children before she entered the study if they don't live in the same household?

Essentially what I want to do is a) to limit the sample to people who didn't have children at the point of entry to the study, 2) to look at the fertility history for the duration of the study for this subset. What I'm going to do then is to look at a combination of nnatch (or the corrected version) and lnprnt (and their analogues for adopted children) at wave 1 for everyone and in waves 2 to 5 for new entrants only and filter out people with values > 0 on any of these variables. For the remaining subset I use the combination of nnatch and lnprnt to code the total number of biological children in and outside the hh in waves 2 to 5. Does this sound about right?

Thank you,

Alexey

Hi Alexey,
apologies, it turns out the _lnprnt is asked of men and women who appear not to have any natural children living in the current household (based on _nnatch). I copy directly from the W2 questionnaire:

"Have you ever fathered/had any biological children?"
Universe
if ff_ivlolw = 2|3|MIS & ff_everint <> 1 //new entrant never interviewed, excluding rising 16 year olds
and if GRIDVARIABLES.NNatCh = 0 //number of biological children in household is 0

That seems to be a pretty straightforward indicator to select your sample! You may want to do some sensitivity analyses and check whether everybody who should have been asked the question was asked (and vice versa) given _nnatch may have been incorrect (using _relationship_dv).

I don't think you can do the same thing for adoptive children but I may be wrong. i can only advise to check the questionnaires carefully for anything that may work in your specific context. What works in one study may not work in another and often times it is a good idea to use different indicators! From the top of my head, the information on the number of living relatives (see the W3/W5 family networks module) may offer some additional insights for you.

Gundi

Thank you. This answers my questions.