Adult female twins' recall of childhood social class and father's education: A validation study for public health research

Abstract

To assess recall of childhood socioeconomic position for public health research, the authors conducted a cross-sectional study of 352 adult women twin pairs enrolled in Examination II of the Kaiser Permanente Women Twins Study carded out in 1989-1990 in Oakland, California. Among twin pairs, 91% (95% confidence interval (CI) 89-94%) agreed on their father's educational level and 81% (95% CI 77-85%) on their childhood social class. Recall did not differ by adult socioeconomic position, zygosity, race/ethnicity, or age. Thus, epidemiologic studies can validly use retrospective data on childhood socioeconomic position to study its relation to adult health status.