The DHS Program User Forum
Discussions regarding The DHS Program data and results
Home » Data » Weighting data » Merging and weighting PR and KR files for under-five children
Merging and weighting PR and KR files for under-five children [message #31427] Wed, 24 September 2025 09:44 Go to next message
Yiqun Luan is currently offline  Yiqun Luan
Messages: 2
Registered: February 2021
Member
Hello,

My research team and I are conducting an analysis to estimate the proportion of children under five who are simultaneously stunted, have mothers with low education, and whose mothers report low frequency of internet use. For this purpose, we are working with the KR files. We would greatly appreciate your guidance on the following methodological questions:

1. Can under-five children who appear in the PR file but not in the KR file (because their mothers were not interviewed) be merged into the KR dataset for analysis?

2. If so, what weight should be assigned to these children? Should household weights (hv005) be used, or is there a recommended approach to deriving appropriate weights for them?

3. If household weights are used for these added children, how should they be integrated with the children in the KR files who already have women's weights (v005), in order to produce a single set of estimates?

We are raising these questions because we want to avoid excluding children whose mothers were not interviewed - since they may represent a particular underprivileged group - while at the same time applying the appropriate weights to ensure nationally representative estimates when working on the KR files after the merge. Any guidance, documentation, or best practices you could share would be extremely helpful for our analysis.

Thank you very much for your time.
Re: Merging and weighting PR and KR files for under-five children [message #31428 is a reply to message #31427] Wed, 24 September 2025 13:30 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Trevor-DHS is currently offline  Trevor-DHS
Messages: 807
Registered: January 2013
Senior Member
I would suggest that you take the PR file as your main file, rather than the KR file, and then merge the women's data onto the PR file data (probably coming from the KR file, and matching using b16) for those children whose mothers were interviewed. This avoids the messy weighting issue as you can just use the household weight for all cases. The entries in the KR file are a subset of the entries in the PR file for the stunting data so I think this would be a simpler and logically cleaner solution.
Re: Merging and weighting PR and KR files for under-five children [message #31438 is a reply to message #31428] Fri, 26 September 2025 14:01 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Yiqun Luan is currently offline  Yiqun Luan
Messages: 2
Registered: February 2021
Member
Thank you so much for your suggestion. it is extremely helpful.

We will use the PR file as the primary source for analysis, merge the mother's information from the KR file onto the PR file, and apply the household weight.

We have one additional question. If we want to estimate the proportion of under-five children who are simultaneously stunted (PR), have mothers not exposed to mass media (merge from KR onto PR), and have been subjected to severe physical punishment (child discipline module in PR), would it still be appropriate to use the household weight? Or should we instead use the child discipline weight, since only under-five children selected for the discipline module constitute the analytic population in this case?
Re: Merging and weighting PR and KR files for under-five children [message #31441 is a reply to message #31438] Mon, 29 September 2025 13:33 Go to previous message
Trevor-DHS is currently offline  Trevor-DHS
Messages: 807
Registered: January 2013
Senior Member
I would recommend using the child discipline weight as children under 5 eligible for that module is your analytic unit.
Previous Topic: Survey Weight
Goto Forum:
  


Current Time: Tue Sep 30 18:03:16 Coordinated Universal Time 2025