Interviewer instructions
Age is among the most important pieces of information for this survey as many of the questions in each section depend on the age of the listed household member. If the respondent does not know his/her age, you must make an estimate by reference to the events that have taken place in his life or that of the community (village, town, district, region) or the world, such as the independence of Tanzania, a flood in the region, the war with Iddi Amin, or the World Wars.
Intensive probing is required to obtain the complete date, month and year of birth. Often respondents will refer to refer events such as:
• Community events/weather conditions
• Religious occasions/holidays
• Public holidays e.g. Independence Day, Union Day, Idd-el-Fitr, Idd ul Hajj, Maulid Christmas, Easter, New Years
• Regional disasters
• Birth intervals
• World events e.g. World War I, II
• The famine that occurred in Tanzania after World War II, in 1946 and 1947.
• National independence in 1961.
• The birth of TANU.
Interviewers in the past projects conducted by EDI Ltd have suggested these additional questions in order to estimate the age of household members:
• Ask when the household member got married, and then add the age of the oldest child to the age of the parent when s/he was married. (However, if the oldest child was born several years before or after the marriage, this method can lead to large errors, so you should probe how long after marriage they got children)
• Compare the age of the household's child with that of a neighbour's child, an age-mate, or playmate.
• Establish the dates of specific events in a given location where the interview takes place and ask how old the member was when the events occurred.
Age must be recorded in full years which the household member has lived since his/her birth. For a child who has not completed 12 month (365 days) you record 0 year. If someone will be 25 years old in two weeks after the date of interview, the recorded age would be 24.
To check if you have recorded the age properly try to compare the age of the parent and that of the first child and see if make sense. When we were testing one of our questionnaires we found a mother with difference of 10yrs to her first daughter that was strange and we had to probe more to discover she was not her biological mother. Age will give you a lot of information which you will be using to prove the answers you getting from the responded.
