Memory Bias in Retrospectively Collected Employment Careers




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Summary: Event history data constitute a valuable source to analyze life courses, although the reliance of such data on autobiographical memory raises many concerns over their reliability. In this paper, we use Swedish survey data to investigate bias in retrospective reports of employment biographies, applying a novel model-based latent Markov method. A descriptive comparison of the biographies as reconstructed by the same respondents at two interviews carried out about 10 years apart reveals that careers appear...