3. Age ____

The age of every person must be stated in completed years only. For those who know their birthdays, the age to record is the age as at last birthday. Age in completed years only means that all the ages must be recorded in full years discarding fractions of years and months. For instance 15 years 11 months should be written down as 15. Do not write down months. Only years are required. All infants who are less than one year should be recorded as being "0" years old.

11b. What to do when a person does not know his age.

For such a person, use the following method to estimate his age:
(1) (a) Ask him to name any historical event (preferably a local one) which he has been told occurred around the time of his birth.
(b) Ask him to give you an indication of how old he was when that event occurred or how many years elapsed before his birth.
(c) Then use this information to work out his age. For example, if a respondent tells you that he was about 15 years when Ghana attained her independence, this person would be 15+25 (i.e. 6th March 1957 to 21st March, 1982=40 years.)

If this method fails, you should try the foil owing approach.
2. (a) Simply estimate how old he may be.
(b) Then select from your list of local, regional or national historical events (see Appendix I)

pg. 45

some events which occurred about the time when according to your estimate, he must have been born.
(c) Ask whether he has heard about any of these events.
(d) If he has, ask him to give you an indication of how old he was when this event occurred or how many years elapsed before he was born.
(e) Then from this information work out his age.

If this second approach also does not elicit the required information, then base your estimate on biological relationships. For instance, a woman who does not know her age but who has two or three children of her own is unlikely to be less than 15 years old, however small she may look. You may then try to work out her age by the following method:

3. (a) Determine the age of her oldest child.
(b) Then assume that the average woman in Ghana gives birth to her first child at about 18. However, without further probing, you should not base your assumption on the oldest child who is at present living. There is the likelihood that in certain cases the child died later on or that the woman had miscarriages or still-born children before the oldest living child was born. Therefore if the woman tells you that she had one miscarriage or still-born before the oldest living child was born, you should make your estimation from the year of the miscarriage, stillborn or live birth.
Note also that some women do not have children early in life whilst others have children earlier than what generally obtains in the community. Therefore in every case you must find out whether she had her first child, miscarriage or still-born at the usual age before you assume she was aged 18 years at her first pregnancy.
(c) Then use the information obtained by means of (A) and (B) above to estimate her age.

4. (a) Only as a last resort, should you estimate a person's age from his physical features.

If you are obtaining information about an absent person from a third person, then obviously you have to rely on the information supplied by the third person in estimating the age in respect of the person who is absent. Under no circumstances must you leave this column blank.