Bias in Measuring Smoking Behavior

Vidhura Tennekoon and Robert Rosenman

No 2013-10, Working Papers from School of Economic Sciences, Washington State University

Abstract: Researchers often use the discrepancy between the self-reported and biochemically assessed active smoking status to argue that self-reported smoking status is not reliable, ignoring the limitations of biochemically assessed measures and treating it as the gold standard in their comparisons. Here, we employ recent advances in econometric techniques to compare self-reported and biochemically assessed smoking data taking into account errors with both methods. Our results suggest that biochemical measures may not always be more reliable than self-reported data.

Keywords: smoking prevalence; misclassification; social desirability; biochemical assessments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C13 C18 I10 I13 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2013-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://faculty.ses.wsu.edu/WorkingPapers/rosenman/WP2013-10.pdf First version, 2013 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden (http://faculty.ses.wsu.edu/WorkingPapers/rosenman/WP2013-10.pdf [307 Temporary Redirect]--> https://ses.wsu.edu/faculty/)

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:wsu:wpaper:rosenman-15

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from School of Economic Sciences, Washington State University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Danielle Engelhardt ().