This report attempts to clarify the nature and extent of reporting errors in the Lesotho Fertility Survey (LFS) of 1977. It contains a brief account of the characteristics of Lesotho's Populations and of the 1977 WFS, a discussion of the various types of error often present in demographic survey data, considers coverage errors and nonresponses in the survey, and provides a detailed assessment of the information collected upon age, nuptiality, fertility, and mortality. In this analysis focus is on 3 types of errors: misreporting of age of the respondent, omission of vital events, and displacement of dates of vital events. These 3 major response errors are interrelated and the effects of 1 type may be indistinguishable from those of another. The most serious problems with the individual survey data are linked to the shortfall in the size of the sample. Interviewers appear to have adopted a variety of strategems to minimize the number of women they interviewed. The most important of these was to return ages of 50 or more for respondents who were in fact eligible for inclusion in the survey, resulting in the exclusion of a number of potential respondents 50 that older women and uneducated women are underrepresented in the sample. Apart from this problem, reporting of age appears to have been very good in both household and individual surveys. The data are subject to only moderate heaping and do not appear to be greatly biased apart from some exaggeration of age among the elderly. Yet, there are some minor errors that have a perceptible effect on certain demographic estimates. It seems that in the individual survey ages 35-59 were subject to slight underreporting and that there was a net movement of older women into the 30-34 year old age group. There was substantial heaping on age 44, suggesting that appreciable numbers of 45-49 year old respondents will have been included in the 40-44 year old age group. These biases in the sample and errors in the age data have an appreciable effect upon certain fertility and mortality estimates obtained from the LFS. The estimates are further biased by a tendency for high parity women to omit births and by displacement of the dates of births on the part of older women. Every indication is that these errors are of little importance for respondents aged less than 40 at the time of the survey. Estimates of the level, trend, and pattern of fertility obtained from the birth histories of women aged less than 40 seem very reliable and indicate that fertility remained constant for a considerable period before the survey and that the total fertility rate is about 5.7. The retrospective information on marriage, widowhood and divorce is of a reasonably high quality as is the age and fertility data collected in the household survey. Estimates of the level and pattern of mortality in childhood obtained from birth histories seem reliable for the decade before the survey and suggest a slow but steady decline in the infant mortality rate. - See more at: http://www.popline.org/node/412473#sthash.v7zEgVYp.dpuf