event dating, accuracy, proxy agreement, interpersonal knowledge, personal events

Quality of self-reports and proxy reports for personal events are examined. 78 couples (age 23 to 40 years old) were separately interviewed and provided the ratings of 22 or less events. The role of one partner (respondent) was to date personal events (exact date) and also to provide ratings of subjective characteristics such as confidence in date estimate, event importance or amount of sharing the event. The role of the other partner (proxy) was to keep an online diary (for six weeks) about events from their partner’s life (or life of the whole family) and provide the same ratings but from their partner’s perspective. The results show similarities and differences of both reports suggesting that proxies’ have some valuable interpersonal knowledge of unique personal events of their partners, though this knowledge is usually quite limited and only occasionally superior—e.g., may not suffer from social desirability as much as respondents’ reports.