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Re: Problem with dates in the Ethiopia datasets [message #9183 is a reply to message #9179] Fri, 19 February 2016 12:02 Go to previous messageGo to previous message
Bridgette-DHS is currently offline  Bridgette-DHS
Messages: 3199
Registered: February 2013
Senior Member
Another response from Tom Pullum:

I will start by repeating an answer I gave on the forum on January 29, but this time with a correction of a typo in the January 29, version, where in the second paragraph I said "Ethiopian" but meant "Gregorian"--sorry about that.

In the 2011 survey, all dates are in the Ethiopian calendar rather than the Gregorian calendar. The cmc is also calculated consistently with the Ethiopian calendar. For example, you can confirm that v008=12(v007 1900) + v006. This consistency is found in all surveys, whether using the Gregorian, Ethiopian, or Nepalese calendars.

To convert to the Gregorian calendar, add 92 to the Ethiopian cmc. Then get the Gregorian year and month from the Gregorian cmc as follows, illustrated again for v006, v007, and v008. I will use vg006, etc, to indicate that these are Gregorian versions of the original Ethiopian codes.

gen vg008=v008+92
gen vg007=int((vg008-1)/12)
gen vg006=vg008-12*v007
replace vg007=vg007+1900

Now to get to your question. Although you may be right that there is a 5-day month in the Ethiopian calendar, I think it must be absorbed in one or both of the adjacent months. If you go to the BR file and enter "tab h9m" or "tab b2", etc., you will see 12 numbered months, all with about the same number of cases. I recommend that you simply do the month and year conversion described above, but keep the day as h9d. I would look at how the days 29, 30, and 31 are converted to a day with "day=mdy(h9m,h9d,h9y)". You will find that certain combinations of year and month and day (even year, because of Leap Year) are rejected, and will produce "day=." because the specified Gregorian month has only 30 days, or in the case of February has only 28 days, except in a Leap Year, when it has 29! (Ten days from now we will have a Feb. 29!) Then I personally would recode h9d for all of the rejected values to 28, but you could go to more trouble and successively convert to 30, then to 29, then to 28, until all combinations of year, month, and day are accepted. The kind of error that will be incurred with this sort of adjustment will be trivial, especially compared with other reporting errors.

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