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Re: Education variables [message #28564 is a reply to message #28538] Wed, 31 January 2024 09:28 Go to previous messageGo to previous message
Janet-DHS is currently offline  Janet-DHS
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Registered: April 2022
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Following is a response from DHS staff member, Tom Pullum:

To find out what is the normative grade of school for a child of a given age, you would have to look into information about each country. You can try to approach the question empirically, although there are some complications and unknowns. The birthdate of the child should be compared with the cutoff birthdate for eligibility. The timing of the survey within the school year would make a difference (about ¾ of children will have a birthday within a 9-month school year). Also some kids will fail a grade and some will skip a grade. There is usually some degree of misreporting by the household respondent.

I went to the PR file for the Malawi 2015-16 survey and entered the following lines: "tab hv123 if hv122==1, summarize(hv105)" and "tab hv123 if hv122==2, summarize(hv105)". There is a very regular progression in the mean age of children in each year of primary school and secondary school. These tables also show that Malawi has (or had) 8 years of primary grades and 4 years of secondary grades. In some other countries you would find 6+6. I think these tables should be helpful for establishing the correspondence between age and grade.
 
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