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Home » Countries » Kenya » Item V613 of the Recode (Trying to give interpretative context to IFS answers)
Re: Item V613 of the Recode [message #28395 is a reply to message #28383] Tue, 26 December 2023 17:40 Go to previous messageGo to previous message
Bridgette-DHS is currently offline  Bridgette-DHS
Messages: 3120
Registered: February 2013
Senior Member

Following is a response from Senior DHS staff member, Tom Pullum:

I didn't mean to move you in the direction of one interpretation or another. I would only suggest that you think in terms of association rather than causation. If someone gives a non-numeric response to a question about desired family size, I think that's an illustration of their world view. To get at a deeper meaning, I would want more in-depth interviews than is possible with DHS data. Your approach sounds good to me.

The question has different meanings for women who are early or late in in the childbearing years. There is a tendency for older women to rationalize the number they actually had. Also, some very large numerical values found in some surveys, like 20 or more, could probably be interpreted as non-numeric.

Here is a link to something I wrote more than 40 years ago:

https://wfs.dhsprogram.com/WFS-SR/ISI-WFS_SR-09_Pullum_1980_ Illustrative%20Analysis%20-%20Fertility%20Preferences%20in%2 0Sri%20Lanka.pdf

I have not stayed with the topic and can't give specific citations related to non-numeric responses.
 
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