Home » Topics » Nutrition and Anthropometry » Missing values for child weight and height
| Missing values for child weight and height [message #5633] |
Thu, 18 June 2015 10:18  |
Christian Bommer
Messages: 13
Registered: June 2015
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Member |
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Hello everyone,
I am using a birth recode file from India (IABR52FL.dta). Having dropped all dead children and those above the age of 5 years at time of the interview, I am left with 48,679 observations. I am interested in the reason why the variables for child's weight and height (i.e. hw2 and hw3) exhibit missing values in some cases. I have already tabulated the variable hw13 ("result of measurement - height/weight") yielding the following frequencies:
measured: 43,740
not present: 1,317
refused: 2,079
other: 268
no measurement found in household: 595
9: 680
Total: 48,679
I am puzzled by the categories "other" and "no measurement found in hh" which are not further explained in the recode manual. Could anyone please give me a hint what they mean (especially the latter one)?
Thank you very much in advance!
Best,
Christian
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| Re: Missing values for child weight and height [message #6683 is a reply to message #5633] |
Fri, 26 June 2015 09:55  |
Liz-DHS
Messages: 1516
Registered: February 2013
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Senior Member |
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Dear User,
Here is a response from two of our experts who worked on the survey, Fred Arnold and Glen Heller:
Quote:Working from the 'BR' - Birth Record - file which is driven by the birth histories collected from each woman. The height and weight information however is collected at the Household level (so as to capture orphans, etc), and thus the "No measurement found in Household" represent Birth History cases for which there were no matching case found in the Height/Weight section.
An explanation of the "other" code and the "9" code. The "other" code includes any result other than MEASURED, NOT PRESENT, and REFUSED. Possible examples are that the weighing scale was not functioning properly or the household became inaccessible (after the household schedule had been completed) due to flooding or other reasons. Code "9" signifies missing cases. [/quote]
If you still have questions, please feel free to post again. Thank you!
[Updated on: Fri, 26 June 2015 10:35] Report message to a moderator |
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| Re: Missing values for child weight and height [message #10225 is a reply to message #6686] |
Mon, 11 July 2016 10:45 |
RenaM
Messages: 6
Registered: May 2015
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Member |
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Dear DHS users,
Related to the previous posts, I have a question with respect to the code "no measurement found in household". In my study on associations between nutrition and experience of IPV (intimate partner violence), I would like to present an overview of missing values per indicator (for women and children, i.e. height/weight, anemia level, questions on IPV) to discuss the issue of (selection) bias in my estimation.
You mention:
The height and weight information however is collected at the Household level (so as to capture orphans, etc), and thus the "No measurement found in Household" represent Birth History cases for which there were no matching case found in the Height/Weight section.
Could you please elaborate a little bit more? What does this mean exactly for data on women and their children in the IR files?
The problem is that in some country surveys (e.g. Malawi 2010, Mali 2012), a large share of anthropometry and hemoglobin data for women AND their children are missing for this reason (around 50%-60%, evermarried women sample). Since I cannot properly explain why these data are missing, my arguments are weak.
Should I just ignore these missing cases or should I include them in my calculations for "Missing observations as percent of eligible women sample"?
Thank you very much.
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| Re: Missing values for child weight and height [message #10248 is a reply to message #10225] |
Tue, 12 July 2016 17:48 |
Trevor-DHS
Messages: 805
Registered: January 2013
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Senior Member |
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There are two parts to the explanation:
1) In DHS, we first interview households, collect a list of persons living in the household and who slept in the household the night before the survey, and for selected groups of these people (children under age 5, women age 15-49, sometimes men age 15-49/54/59) we collect anthropometric measures and biomarker information. When we interview women we also collect a history of all of the children the woman has given birth to. HW13 in the BR and KR files relates to all of the children the woman has given birth to, and some of these may not live in the household. Any living child of the woman interviewed who does not usually live in the household and did not sleep in the household the night before the survey will have no anthropometric information collected for them in the household/biomarker questionnaire and are coded "No measurement found in household".
2) For surveys such as Malawi 2010 and Mali 2012 the anthropometric and biomarker information collected in the survey was only collected in a portion of the sample. For Malawi 2010, see section 1.7 on page 5 of the Malawi DHS 2010 report which explains that the hemoglobin test was conducted in a sub-sample of one third of households only. For Mali DHS 2012, I believe that a subsample of half of the households was used (see Mali 2012-13 DHS report). You should select only the households that were selected for the anthropometry and biomarker data collection (v042 == 1). to see the cases selected and not selected.
In general when analyzing the data on nutrition of children, we would recommend using the PR file and the HC series of variables which includes all children living in the household or who slept in the household the previous night and on which we base our analysis, rather than the BR or KR file. However, as it appears that you are linking this to intimate partner violence, there is no advantage to this as you need to be linking women and their children, but this also means that you will have no anthropometry or biomarker information for any child who does not live with the respondent, which would clearly be a limitation of your study (with a possible bias as it is possible that children not living with their mothers may be correlated with intimate partner violence).
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