Data Quality Issues in the Italian Longitudinal Household Panel (ILFI) Lifecourse Event History Calendar and Dependent Interviewing

The Italian longitudinal household panel (ILFI) collects data at a biennial rate since 1997 on a sample of about 5,000 households. During the first wave, a face-to-face lifecourse event history calendar (L-EHC) instrument was administered collecting data for each member 18 years or older on five domains: residence history, education, vocational training, job- career, family for-mation and fertility event. The calendar was used to reconstruct the life history of each subject for the five domains since the time they were born. Since 1999, answers collected from the pre-vious wave were used as a starting point (proactive dependent interviewing) to collect data from the above domains. In order to test the quality of the data collected with the L-EHC, we com-pared the self-reported recall of job status with data coming from official statistics collected b