Re: Pooling 3 rounds of DHS dataset [message #13524 is a reply to message #13513] |
Tue, 14 November 2017 08:30 |
Bridgette-DHS
Messages: 3199 Registered: February 2013
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Senior Member |
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Following is a response from Senior DHS Stata Specialist, Tom Pullum:
Because these surveys sampled completely different individuals, you cannot link individuals in successive surveys. Therefore you cannot do a merge, as such. Instead you construct a very long file that just adds the files together. In Stata, this is done with an "append" command.
Combining the three surveys into a single file can simplify some data processing if you are looking at trends, for example. However, I strongly recommend against, say, calculating the mean number of children ever born for the combination of the three surveys. Such a mean has no reference point in time and is affected by the arbitrary differences in the sample sizes and is not interpretable.
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