Kontextgestützte Abfrage in Retrospektiverhebungen: Ein kognitiver Pretest zu Erinnerungsprozessen bei Weiterbildungsereignissen

"Further education and training activities are considered to be recalled only with difficulty. Therefore non-formal and informal training activities have mostly not been collected in retrospective surveys. Within the framework of the IAB-ALWA study 'Working and Learning in a Changing World' also short and relatively insignificant training episodes that occurred sometime in the past are of central interest. For this reason it is examined whether the recalling of activities through a context based re-trieval process is realistic. Thus we addressed in a cognitive pretest the question whether by remembering further education episodes there is a connection between the memory strategies used by respondents and the amount of events as well as the time-lag to the context of memorization - in our case the employment episodes. The results of the cognitive pretest show that respondents remember training activities from the recent past well. For long foregone events context based memory strategies are frequently used. In sum it is shown that the context based retrieval process is an appropiate instrument for the retrospective data collection of training activities which are dated back only few years. The longer the retrospective intervall, the greater the memory problems which cannot be compensated by the context based retrieval process. Based on the findings of the cognitive pretest adopted instruments were applied in the main survey of the IAB-ALWA study and in the follow-up study, the first wave of the adult stage of the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS)." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))