4. Age: What was your age on your last birthday?
Use the first line for people one year old or more, use the second line for people under one year of age, use the third line for people less than one month old.

Ask these questions for all of the persons, independent of their age or other situation:

Question 4: Age

In this space write the age of the person in years completed, which means, his or her age at the last birthday.

You should make the annotation in only one of the three lines. For the persons one year old and older, you should write the number of years completed at the last birthday. If it deals with children less than one year old, indicate the number of months completed (two months, eleven months, etc.). In the case of children younger than one month, write the number of days alive (twenty-six days, three days, etc.). If a newborn is less than one day old, you will note zero days.

In some cases, persons reduce their age; in other cases, persons prefer to increase their age, for which in any case it would be convenient to verify the declared age by requesting the date of birth, even when there is necessary that the enumerated consults his or her national identification document.

The same procedure should be followed in the case of declared ages in numbers that end in zero or five (25, 30, 45 years, etc.), since there is a tendency to report ages in numbers like these, when the age is not known for sure. Every good enumerator should insist in obtaining the exact age of each person, avoiding whenever possible the noting of rounded ages.

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Since in Guatemala there is a very common custom of declaring age as the number of years that are going to be fulfilled and not those that were fulfilled at the last birthday, it is necessary that you always ask if the declared age corresponds effectively to that already completed. Such is the case of a person who is fifteen years old, so that person entered or is almost sixteenth years old, and abbreviating, he or she simply informs 16 when in reality at the last birthday he or she is 15 years old.

When it is impossible to obtain the exact age of a person, not even remembering the year in which he she was born, you should help the informant to obtain approximated data, using historic remembrances, local and national (revolutions, storms, plagues, earthquakes, etc.)

When the person is not present at the time of the enumeration, you have to try to find out his or her age, even if it is an approximation, either from other persons who inhabit the same dwelling or through the neighbors, noting in the space for "observations" that this is an approximate age. If there is no possibility to find out the age even in approximated form, you should write "unknown" in the corresponding box.