Why does “last week” reporting give higher estimates than “last month”?

Diganta Mukherjee and Prabir Chaudhury

Communications in Statistics - Theory and Methods, 2020, vol. 49, issue 8, 1873-1893

Abstract: Experiments in various countries with “last week” and “last month” reference periods for reporting of households’ food consumption have generally found that “week”-based estimates are higher. In India the National Sample Survey (NSS) has consistently found that “week”-based estimates are higher than month-based estimates for a majority of food item groups. But why are week-based estimates higher than month-based estimates? It has long been believed that the reason must be recall lapse, inherent in a long reporting period such as a month. But is household consumption of a habitually consumed item “recalled” in the same way as that of an item of infrequent consumption? And why doesn’t memory lapse cause over-reporting (over-assessment) as often as under-reporting? In this paper, we provide an alternative hypothesis, involving a “quantity floor effect” in reporting behavior, under which “week” may cause over-reporting for many items. We design a test to detect the effect postulated by this hypothesis and carry it out on NSS 68th round HCES data. The test results strongly suggest that our hypothesis provides a better explanation of the difference between week-based and month-based estimates than the recall lapse theory.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/03610926.2019.1565838 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:lstaxx:v:49:y:2020:i:8:p:1873-1893

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/lsta20

DOI: 10.1080/03610926.2019.1565838

Access Statistics for this article

Communications in Statistics - Theory and Methods is currently edited by Debbie Iscoe

More articles in Communications in Statistics - Theory and Methods from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().