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Recall of Psychiatric History in Cross-sectional Surveys: Implications for Epidemiologic Research
Abstract
Data from a variety of sources suggest the possibility of significant errors in lifetime recall of psychiatric illness. Remote episodes of illness may often be forgotten, especially among patients with milder or less recurrent illness or those who received no treatment. These errors in recall may lead to significant underestimation of true lifetime prevalence and may produce the appearance of large temporal increases in risk in the absence of any true change. When assessing lifetime history, cross-sectional surveys may differentially underestimate prevalence in the elderly and in those with less severe or recurrent illness. While lifetime risk of depression and other psychiatric disorders may not be increasing as rapidly as suggested by cross-sectional surveys, the overall impact of such disorders over the life span may be significantly greater than previous community surveys have indicated.
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“Retrospective recall is associated with decreased reliability as a result of memory deterioration, hindsight and recall bias, and a tendency to overemphasize past events, which provide an explanation for current problems (Hardt and Rutter, 2004) or underestimate past morbidity (Simon and VonKorff, 1995).”
From Factors associated with recovery from anorexia nervosa (2013) · cites this paper as Simon and VonKorff, 1995
In the citing paper
“Retrospective recall entails sources of invalidity that limit inference about the developmental origins of adults with disorder(15-17).”
From Is adult ADHD a childhood-onset neurodevelopmental disorder? Evidence from a four-decade longitudinal cohort study (2015) · cites this paper as [17]
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“Simon et al ( 42 ) have noted that recall errors more often involve underestimation of past morbidity than reporting or exaggerating episodes that did not actually occur.”
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“…more past depression is consistent with cognitive models for depression (Beck et al., 1979) and previous research on long-term recall of depression (Simon and VonKorff, 1995), i.e. depressed individuals are more likely to have negative thoughts than not-depressed individuals and thus are more…”
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Metadata
- Authors
- Simon, G. E., & VonKorff, M.
- Affiliations
- Group Health Cooperative (US)
- Corresponding author
- Simon, Gregory E.
- ORCID
- Simon, Gregory E.
- Venue
- Epidemiologic Reviews
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Published
- 1995
- Volume
- 17
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 221-227
- ISSN
- 0193-936X (ISSN-L)
- 1478-6729
- OpenAlex
- W1531843813
- Cited by
- 269
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 1 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 10 · 2021: 7 · 2020: 8 · 2019: 5 · 2018: 15 · 2017: 7 · 2016: 15 · 2015: 11 · 2014: 15 · 2013: 16 · 2012: 13
- FWCI
- 11.39
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Epidemiologic Reviews (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- U.S. Public Health Service (51338)
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Psychiatry and Mental health › Mental Health Treatment and Access
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Survey Methodology and Nonresponse
- Physical Sciences › Mathematics › Statistics and Probability › Statistical Methods in Epidemiology
- Keywords
- lifetime prevalence, recall bias, cross-sectional survey, depression, mental illness, underestimation of prevalence, older adults, disease severity
- MeSH terms
- Mental Disorders, Cross-Sectional Studies, Humans, Medical History Taking, Mental Recall, Reproducibility of Results, Bias
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