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Education variables [message #28538]

Sat, 27 January 2024 05:36

bugz
Messages: 8
Registered: January 2024

Member

I want to calculate the grade a person has completed by the year of the interview conducted.
I checked for variables v107 and v106 in Malawi DHS data using BR file.
When restricted to, age between 7-11 and then to the primary education and look into the ages, the age of 7 years are in catogory 8 in v107 variable.
I'm confused on the categorization of this level of highest year of education and the age.

Restricted to primary education;

highest |
educational |
level | Freq. Percent Cum.
-------------+-----------------------------------
primary | 13,541 100.00 100.00
-------------+-----------------------------------
Total | 13,541 100.00

The tabulation shows the age group 7 who have completed 6, 7, 8 years as shown below;

tab v107 b8

highest year of | current age of child
education | 7 8 9 10 11 | Total
----------------------+------------------------------------- ------------------+----------
no years completed at | 70 49 61 54 44 | 278
1 | 219 206 208 209 190 | 1,032
2 | 353 320 305 340 276 | 1,594
3 | 403 398 326 377 309 | 1,813
4 | 356 353 307 340 265 | 1,621
5 | 419 360 345 375 280 | 1,779
6 | 401 347 318 324 270 | 1,660
7 | 462 413 365 343 366 | 1,949
8 | 409 391 374 366 275 | 1,815
----------------------+------------------------------------- ------------------+----------
Total | 3,092 2,837 2,609 2,728 2,275 | 13,541

1. Is it correct to identify the v107 year as the grade a person may attend in school, or what is the interpretation of the categorization,
2. Could you please tell me how to calculate the primary school grade a person is in, for the survey year, that is compatible with the age.

thank you so much!

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[Updated on: Sat, 27 January 2024 19:29]

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Re: Education variables [message #28564 is a reply to message #28538]

Wed, 31 January 2024 09:28

Janet-DHS
Messages: 895
Registered: April 2022

Senior Member

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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Re: Education variables [message #28612 is a reply to message #28564]

Mon, 05 February 2024 22:47

bugz
Messages: 8
Registered: January 2024

Member

thank you for your clear explanation. It helped me understand the structure

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