Multinational Event History Calendar Interviewing

The event history calendar (EHC) is usually a matrix with column headings indicating calendar years and/or months and rows representing different life domains. In EHC interviews, information is first collected on domains with relatively easy to recall events. This chapter describes how the quality of the fairly complex interviews conducted in multiple languages and countries could be verified. It evaluates the type of information used for cross‐checking across countries and also describes how it developed training and monitoring scheme adapted to EHC interviews in a large‐scale survey on smoking history. Since interviewer‐related bias may differ across countries, the chapter discusses interviewer effects and effectiveness of feedback based on monitoring across countries based on behavior coding data of interviews conducted in five countries. It also discusses the number of valid interviews, audio‐recorded interviews, and feedback processing speed.