Autobiographical memory and the valildity of retrospective reports

Much of our knowledge about individuals' behavior, the state of society, or social change is based on direct verbal reports. From consumer behavior to health problems, and from the styles of parenting to the nation's unemployment rate or the prevalence of crime, social scientists and psychologists rely on respondents' autobiographical memory for testing theories of human behavior and offering advice on public policy.

The recent revival of basic psychological research into autobiographical memory coincides with an increasing interest in cognitive aspects of the survey process in the survey research community. Presumably, the better we understand the cognitive processes used to answer retrospective questions, the better we shall be able to design questionnaires that facilitate respondents' performance. At the least, we should be able to get a better understanding of how well respondents are able to perform the tasks that are given them, and what tasks it is reasonable to expect a respondent to perform.

These hopes have fueled much of the recent collaboration between cognitive psychologists and survey methodologists on this topic reported in Autobiographical Memory and the Validity of Retrospective Reports. This book presents a careful theoretical framework to explain autobiographical memory as well as the most recent empirical findings on retrospective reports of behavior, event dating and time estimation, and comparisons of self and proxy reports.

While there is still much to learn, the book demonstrates that significant progress has been made in recent years in this important area.