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Re: Information on whether a birth was preterm ? [message #11448 is a reply to message #11398]

Thu, 22 December 2016 02:09

Trevor-DHS
Messages: 805
Registered: January 2013

Senior Member

There are two sources for duration of pregnancy, depending on the survey.

If the survey used a pregnancy history then there are survey specific variables that contain the pregnancy history data. These will often have names like S215 (where S means survey specific and 215 would be the question number). The variable name will be different from survey to survey but you should be able to find it with a name similar to this (check for any variable starting with "S21" or "S22"). This is only available for a relatively small set of surveys. You can see the list of surveys using the pregnancy history with: http://api.dhsprogram.com/rest/dhs/surveys?f=html&Survey Status=All&SurveyCharacteristicIds=30

In surveys that used a reproductive/contraceptive calendar (found in vcal_1 [Stata] or vcal$1 [SPSS] in the Individual Recode files) the duration of the pregnancy is included for pregnancies in the 5 and a bit years preceding the survey (the calendar typically goes back to January of the year five years before the survey, thus the extra bit). This is a test string of 80 characters, with each character position representing one month in the respondents life. In the calendar text string the left hand end of the string is nearest the month of interview, with blanks at the beginning representing months after the date of interview. Once you see the characters start in the string there will be a character for every month to the start point of the calendar five+ years before the survey. A letter "B" indicates a month in which a birth took place, and a series of letter "P"s to the right of that represents each other month in which the respondent was pregnant. The duration of pregnancy is given by the number of "P"s plus 1 for the "B" in the month of birth.

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[Message index]

		Information on whether a birth was preterm ? By: MBruederle on Wed, 17 August 2016 05:13
		Re: Information on whether a birth was preterm ? By: Liz-DHS on Wed, 24 August 2016 11:52
		Re: Information on whether a birth was preterm ? By: MBruederle on Mon, 12 December 2016 06:46
		Re: Information on whether a birth was preterm ? By: Trevor-DHS on Thu, 22 December 2016 02:09
		Re: Information on whether a birth was preterm ? By: MBruederle on Mon, 09 January 2017 10:44
		Re: Information on whether a birth was preterm ? By: Trevor-DHS on Mon, 09 January 2017 16:45
		Re: Information on whether a birth was preterm ? By: chr8850 on Wed, 06 April 2022 13:18

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