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Information about length of Maternity History and Health History across countries [message #23706] Thu, 11 November 2021 00:18 Go to next message
Olena Stavrunova is currently offline  Olena Stavrunova
Messages: 3
Registered: November 2021
Member
Dear community,

The DHS recode manual says the following about health history in some DHS surveys: "The health history contains up to six entries, relating to children born in the last three/five years."

I need to know which countries/survey years had 3 and which had 5 years of health history. I want to know the same for maternity history as well.

Is there a file somewhere where I can get this information for all countries/years?

And if no, how do I know which time frame was used for a particular dataset to collect health and maternity history?

Thank you!
Re: Information about length of Maternity History and Health History across countries [message #23726 is a reply to message #23706] Wed, 17 November 2021 14:06 Go to previous message
Bridgette-DHS is currently offline  Bridgette-DHS
Messages: 3017
Registered: February 2013
Senior Member

Following is a response from DHS Research & Data Analysis Director, Tom Pullum:


In a DHS survey, the birth history (we use that term more often than maternity history) is complete. It goes back to the first birth the woman had. To get the time interval covered by the health history, you can go to the Stata version of the KR file and enter "summarize b8" (b8 is the current age--at last birthday--of a child). Usually the age range will be 0-4, implying that the health history was for the past 5 years. If the maximum age is 2, then the questions were for the past 3 years. There are many other ways to get at this. A few surveys have intervals other than 5 or 3.

Many questions are restricted to certain age intervals, or restricted to the youngest child, etc. To get at those restrictions you have to look at the questionnaire or read the title and notes for the relevant table(s) in the final report.

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