Estimating Adult and Old Age Mortality From Parental Survival Histories Collected Over the Phone: A Validation Study From Bangladesh

OBJECTIVES: Bangladesh, a lower-middle-income (LMIC) South Asian country, relies on survey data for measuring adult mortality. Mobile phone surveys are an appealing alternative to in-person surveys because they are cheaper and can be deployed when enumerator mobility is hindered. In this contribution, we examined the quality of 'Parental Survival History' data collected over the phone by comparing it with data from a Health and Demographic Surveillance System. METHODS: We conducted a mobile phone survey from July to December 2021 among residents of the Matlab HDSS. Mobile phone survey data about the respondent's father and mother were individually matched to the HDSS database. Data were compared to the HDSS reference in terms of the vital status of the respondent's parents, their age, the time since death and adult mortality rates. RESULTS: A total of 2231 respondents reported information on their parents. Among these, 90.7% of fathers' names and 95.2% of mothers' names were matched between the mobile phone survey and the HDSS, and the matched dataset was used for subsequent analyses. Concordance in the vital status reports of the parent was very high (both sensitivity and specificity were above 99%). Further, we found that 50% of the parents' ages (current age for those who are alive and age at death for parents who died) were within 5 years below and 3 years above those recorded in the HDSS. Around 4% of parental deaths were erroneously located within or outside an 8-year reference period. The parents' mortality rate was 52.0 (95% CI: 49.3, 54.8) per 1000 person-years in the mobile phone survey and 52.3 (95% CI: 49.6, 55.0) in the HDSS. CONCLUSIONS: In this population, parental survival history data were reported with high accuracy in a mobile phone survey, highlighting their potential for measuring adult mortality in resource-constrained settings.