43-46 Mosher

Volume 30, Number 1, January/February 1998 swers into a laptop computer. A revised questionnaire using CAPI was pretested between October and December 1993. About 800 eligible women were selected, and 500 were interviewed. The pretest was an experiment, which compared results for women who received incentives with results for women who did not. Incentives increased response rates, reduced costs and improved the reporting of sensitive information,4 as previous literature had suggested.5 The 1993 pretest also tested the use of audio computer-assisted self-interviewing (audio CASI) for sensitive topics, such as abortion (some of which were also covered in the CAPI component). With audio CASI, the respondent hears the questions over a pair of headphones or reads them on the screen of a laptop computer, and enters her responses into the computer herself. Pretest respondents rated audio CASI very highly and reported more abortions using audio CASI than they reported to the interviewer.6 Given the results of the pretest, approval was sought and obtained to offer a $20 incentive to respondents in the NSFG, and to use audio CASI to collect data on abortion and a few other sensitive items.7 During 1994, revisions were made in the questionnaire, and the questionnaire was tested extensively and translated into Spanish. The 1995 NSFG questionnaire covered the following (Table 1, page 44): •Event histories. In the first section, the respondent was introduced to the Life History Calendar, an 11-by-17-inch form on which she was asked to enter the month and year of five or six events in her life that she remembered well. Then three major event histories were collected: when the woman lived with her mother, father and grandparents while growing up; her regular, vocational and GED education; and her work history.8 None of these histories had been collected in previous cycles of the NSFG. William D. Mosher is a statistician with the Reproductive Statistics Branch of the National Center for Health Statistics, Hyattsville, MD. The 1995 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) was jointly planned and funded by three units of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), the Office of Population Affairs, and the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development. Additional support was provided by the Administration for Children and Families. The fieldwork contractor for the NSFG was the Research Triangle Institute, Research Triangle Park, NC, Allen P. Duffer, Jr., project director. Data from the 1995 NSFG are publicly available on CD-ROM from the Government Printing Office, from NCHS (301-436-8500), on mainframe computer tape from the National Technical Information Service (accession no. PB 97-50154) for $395 and from Sociometrics Corp. (800-846-DISK). The data are also available to member institutions of the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (, study 6960). Design and Operation of the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth