The authors investigate the accuracy of young women’s retrospective reporting on their first substantial employment in three major, nationally representative U.S. surveys, examining hypotheses that longer recall duration, employment histories with lower salience and higher complexity, and an absence of “anchoring” biographical details will adversely affect reporting accuracy. The authors compare retrospective reports to benchmark panel survey estimates for the same cohorts. Sociodemographic groups—notably non-Hispanic white women and women with college-educated mothers—whose early employment histories at these ages are in aggregate more complex (multiple jobs) and lower in salience (more part-time jobs) are more likely to omit the occurrence of their first substantial job or employment and to misreport their first job or employment as occurring at an older age. Also, retrospective reports are skewed toward overreporting longer, therefore more salient, later jobs over shorter, earlier jobs. The relatively small magnitudes of differences, however, indicate that the retrospective questions nevertheless capture these summary indicators of first substantial employment reasonably accurately. Moreover, these differences are especially small for groups of women who are more likely to experience labor-market disadvantage and for women with early births.

中文翻译：

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美国妇女生命历程中首次就业的回顾性报告

作者调查了年轻女性在三项具有全国代表性的主要美国调查中对其首次实质性就业的回顾性报告的准确性，检验了以下假设：更长的回忆持续时间、具有较低显着性和较高复杂性的就业历史以及缺乏“锚定”传记细节将对报告准确性产生不利影响。作者将回顾性报告与同一队列的基准小组调查估计值进行了比较。社会人口群体——尤其是非西班牙裔白人女性和母亲受过大学教育的女性——在这些年龄段的早期就业经历总体上更复杂（多份工作）且重要性较低（更多兼职工作）更有可能忽略发生他们的第一份实质性工作或就业，并将他们的第一份工作或就业误报为年龄较大。此外，回顾性报告倾向于多报时间更长、因此更显着的后期工作，而不是更短、更早的工作。然而，相对较小的差异表明，回顾性问题仍然相当准确地捕捉了首次实质性就业的这些总结指标。而且，