De volledigheid van informatie over feiten in het verleden zoals gegeven door ondervraagden bij een enquête

Samenvatting

Two research projects are discussed. They were designed to analyze the influence of the time interval between a fact & its registration, on the reliability of obtained data. Ss for the first project were 328 residents of Utrecht, fifteen or older. They were asked to list areas of town they had passed through "yesterday" & "the day before." The facts could not be controlled. The differences between the "yesterday" report & the "the day before" report with respect to the same day were analyzed. A similar experiment was carried out using as variable the number of pages of a given magazine that had been read during a given period of time (yesterday noon, yesterday evening, ...). It was concluded that: (1) within a limited time interval it is possible to obtain sufficiently precise & reliable information, (2) the more the original situation can be reconstructed the more reliable will be the information (ie, handing out a map of town, handing out a magazine), & (3) when any suggestion of completeness is at stake (ie, having read all the pages of a magazine), interviewees tend to exaggerate the facts. 4 Tables, 2 Figures. Modified HA.