Analysts who research the effect of education on behaviour related to the transition to adulthood are often limited by information available from censuses and surveys, which generally collect only the highest level of education attained at the time of the interview. Unfortunately, this leads to extreme simplification of people's educational paths and does not allow researchers to know exactly when they completed their studies, whether they did so satisfactorily, or whether they had periods of interruption in their educational cycle. In this paper we therefore investigate the problems deriving from having incomplete educational information when analysing events of transition to adulthood such as leaving the parental home, forming a first union, and having a first child. These needs for more detailed information explain why some surveys have questionnaires that would allow for reconstruction of the complete educational history, but this information is difficult to collect and to use. In order to overcome these difficulties of either the complexity or excessive simplicity of questionnaires on education, we propose a new set of questions. These would permit researchers to provide, with the minimum number of questions, the maximum possible useful information on the level and duration of studies, while also taking into account the most important and relevant interruptions. For the empirical analysis we have used the Fertility and Family Surveys (FFS) for 12 European countries with sufficient data to reconstruct the complete educational cycle.
Keywords: Education; Questionnaire; Surveys; Survival analysis; Transition to adulthood.
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