How should centenarian date of birth fields be handled?

Question

"A centenarian is a person who has attained the age of 100 years or more." - Wikipedia

There are several ways to prompt a user for Date of Birth, but let's say we've chosen the drop down method.

How would you handle the oldest selectable date? Do you pick an arbitrary year (such as 1875) and populate to present?

Or, do you consult some resource for a record breaking age (Jeanne Calment, age 122), add a couple of years, and populate backwards?

Answer 1

Why not a text input box where they type in "1899" or whatever? When it is received you can validate that it is a legitimate number based on whatever criteria you use. I get annoyed by listboxes to select year of birth, because listboxes should not have that many values in them.

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Rereading the question, you are assuming that listbox is the only option. In that case, 130 years ago seems like a good enough cutoff to me. If you're worried that the next world-record breaker will happen to be using your system, why not go with something like 200 years ago. Although I'd still say you should just use a text box.

Answer 2

It depends I think. Are you creating an application for young people?

If the application needs to be accessible for everyone, just create a configurable check and update it now and then. Look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest%5Fpeople#Ten%5Foldest%5Fpeople%5Fcurrently%5Fliving for the oldest possible date.

A date picker is preferable, don't use irritating listboxes with 100+ values.

Answer 3

As you're going to have to perform server-side validate the input regardless of the control used, why not use a standard text input?

`<input type="text" maxlength="4"/>

This:

1. Eliminates the centenarian problem.
2. Easier to use, especially for older individuals (Assuming the list is in descending order).
3. Smaller page size (don't need to include 100+ <option>....</option> tags.

If you must use a <select> box, I agree with your Wikipedia methodology. Ceiling the age of the oldest recorded person (126 -> 130 or 140) would be fairly risk-free.

Answer 4

If you want to stick to drop downs, just pick an old enough date. Personally I think drop downs are bad both for the user and you. I find selecting my birthday from a list of hundred numbers annoying (even though firefox lets me select the date by typing it). But also I think a selection makes people tend to input fake years more than if they had to type it in.

If you can live with Javascript, a Combobox might be the best of both worlds. You can list 100 years in the list, and let older people type. This only has minor ethical problem, i.e. you purposefully make elderly people type =)

Answer 5

My opinion on data entry like this is to cater to the user, not the programmer.
While, yes, a drop-down causes the least error handling, it's also tedious for the users.

Go for text entry that you need to validate. More code is needed in the back [allowing for both 2 digit years and 4 digit], but it's an easier experience for the user