Plan and operation of the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth

This report describes how the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) was designed, planned, and implemented. The NSFG is a national survey of women 15-44 years of age designed to provide national estimates of factors affecting pregnancy and birth rates and the health of women and infants. Planning for the 1995 NSFG began in 1990 at a formal conference with the survey's data users. Suggestions for substantial changes and improvements in the survey were made there and carried out by NSFG staff and the NSFG contractor--the Research Triangle Institute (RTI).

The survey was converted from paper and pencil interviewing to Computer-Assisted Personal Interviewing (CAPI) to improve the quality, consistency, and timeliness of the data. At the same time, event histories of the respondent's work, education, family background, cohabitation, and sexual partners were added to lend explanatory power to the survey. These changes made the interview and the CAPI program long--average interview length was 103 minutes--and complex, but the CAPI program worked very well.

About 260 female interviewers were trained for 7 days in January 1995. These interviewers completed a total of 10,847 interviews with women 15-44 years of age, for a response rate of 79 percent. This report describes how the survey was planned and designed and how the data were collected, edited, and processed for public use. This report may be of interest to NSFG data users and to those planning other computer-assisted surveys.