[Babase] MCE gender mistakes, and proposed valinter changes

Jeanne Altmann babase@www.eco.princeton.edu
Wed, 18 Feb 2004 14:33:55 -0500


One more addition to Daphne's comments, and another reason we might want 
further checking at the babase entry level is that through the years some 
additional field errors have been caught by the entry person identifying a 
problem and coming to me with it before entering it.  This doesn't happen 
very often, but it only gets caught when the entry person knows the names 
well enough to identify the problem to start with.

jeanne

At 01:52 PM 2/18/2004 -0500, you wrote:
>Hi everyone,
>
>The errors that Karen emailed about earlier (with CHE as an actor for
>MCEs) are corrected in Parts.
>
>I did some querying to see if there were any other cases for MCEs in
>Interact and Parts where the actor was a female, or the actee was a
>male.  There were 9 altogether (in addition to Karen's 5), out of almost
>23,000 MCEs, so we're talking about a very low percentage.  A couple
>more were entry mistakes like the ones that Karen found.  One was
>recorded backwards (female M male) and thus was entered backwards.  I
>have corrected these in Interacts and Parts.
>
>The others were cases where the data were recorded as female M female or
>male M male (one case involved a consort, but in that case I think the
>sname was recorded wrong).  We don't know whether these mounts actually
>happened and were recorded (though these types of mounts are not
>supposed to be recorded), or if the wrong sname was recorded.  Is
>everyone agreed that they should be deleted from Interact and Parts?
>
>Do we want to put a better check on this is the valinter program?
>Assuming that this is possible (Karl?), we could have it check that, for
>all MCEs, all actors are male and all actees are female.  Further, since
>the monitoring guide says that MCEs should only be recorded between
>males that are at least 4 years old and females that have reached
>menarche, it could also check that these conditions are true for the
>actors and actees.  This would be a back-up system to the field
>assistants recording MCEs by these rules.  Interactions are not updated
>until the demography for that period is updated, so that information
>should be in Biograph by the time the MCEs are updated.
>
>Susan, do you think it's a good idea to put these checks in valinter?
>Karl, is it possible?  Or does it not matter since this is so rare?
>
>Daphne
>
>
>
>
>
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