[Babase] MCE gender mistakes, and proposed valinter changes

Daphne Onderdonk babase@www.eco.princeton.edu
Wed, 18 Feb 2004 13:52:37 -0500


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