No abstract

This note analyzes the association between media exposure and reproductive behavior in 48 developing countries. A summary of part of a more extensive Demographic and Health Surveys report, it shows strong connections between media exposure and the use of modern contraception, the number of children desired, and recent fertility. Television viewing is particularly important; it is assumed to expose viewers to aspects of modern life that compete with traditional attitudes toward the family and is associated with greater use of modern contraceptive methods, with a desire for fewer children, and with lower fertility. These relationships are particularly noteworthy because the data measure only the frequency of media exposure with no information about its content.

Partnership formation is an important developmental task for adolescents, but cross‐sectional and periodic longitudinal studies have lacked the measurement precision to portray partnership stability and flux and to capture the range of adolescent partnership experiences. This article assesses the promises and challenges of using bi‐weekly mobile diaries administered over the course of a year to study adolescent partnership dynamics. Descriptive findings illustrate the potential of bi‐weekly diaries for both capturing the longitudinal complexity and fluidity of adolescent partnerships as well as for reducing retrospection biases. Results also underscore several challenges, including those posed by missing data, and highlight several strategies for maximizing participant engagement and reliably tracing adolescent partnerships.

Researchers rely on metadata systems to prepare data for analysis. As the complexity of data sets increases and the breadth of data analysis practices grow, existing metadata systems can limit the efficiency and quality of data preparation. This article describes the redesign of a metadata system supporting the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study on the basis of the experiences of participants in the Fragile Families Challenge. The authors demonstrate how treating metadata as data (i.e., releasing comprehensive information about variables in a format amenable to both automated and manual processing) can make the task of data preparation less arduous and less error prone for all types of data analysis. The authors hope that their work will facilitate new applications of machine-learning methods to longitudinal surveys and inspire research on data preparation in the social sciences. The authors have open-sourced the tools they created so that others can use and improve them.

We analyze recruitment, access, and longitudinal response paradata from a yearlong intensive longitudinal study (mDiary) that used a mobile-optimized web app to administer 25 biweekly diaries to youth recruited from a birth cohort study. Analyses investigate which aspects of teen recruitment experiences are associated with enrollment and longitudinal response patterns; whether compliance behavior of teens who require multiple invitations to enroll differs from that of teens who enroll on the first invitation, and what personal and social circumstances are associated with different longitudinal compliance patterns. Latent class analysis (LCA) is used to derive longitudinal compliance classes. mDiary’s person-survey response rate of 70% is noteworthy considering reports that response rates for smartphone studies trail those administered via telephone or personal computers. Conditional on agreeing to participate, teens with texting capability were over 6 times as likely to enroll as their peers lacking access, and they also completed six to seven more diaries. Youth who required multiple prods to register not only were less likely to enroll than their peers who registered at the first invitation but also tended to attrite early. Compared with teens who completed all 25 surveys, those who attrited early had less access to texting capability, home Internet service, and also had low-education mothers. Consistent with studies of adults, nonparticipants were disproportionately Black males from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds.