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Missing Data [message #5512] Tue, 02 June 2015 09:20 Go to next message
MissJibo is currently offline  MissJibo
Messages: 5
Registered: May 2015
Location: United Kingdom
Member
Hi.
Please is there any documentation by DHS on missing data for each country. Is there an explanation of why some data e.g. age of children in months is missing for most participants in many datasets? Thank you for your help.
Re: Missing Data [message #5615 is a reply to message #5512] Tue, 16 June 2015 16:19 Go to previous message
Liz-DHS
Messages: 1516
Registered: February 2013
Senior Member
Dear User,
The Guide to DHS Statistics has a descriptive section on missing and other special values, beginning on Page 10: Quote:
Missing Values and Other Special Codes
In DHS, a missing value is defined as a variable that should have a response, but because of interview
errors the question was not asked. For example, questions 111 and 112 must be answered by women with
no education or only primary school education. If the interviewer incorrectly marked question 110 as
secondary school or higher when in fact the respondent only completed primary school, questions 111 and
112 do not get asked. The general rule for DHS data processing is that "UNDER NO
CIRCUMSTANCES AN ANSWER SHOULD BE MADE UP;" instead a missing value will be assigned.
The data will be kept as missing in the data file and no imputation for this kind of questions is assigned.
As will be discussed below, only the seven dates related to women's chronological events are imputed.
Missing values in general are codes 9, 99, 999, 9999, etc. depending on the variable number of digits.
There are however some important background variables where the missing code is not accepted:

The Guide to DHS Statistics can be downloaded from http:// www.dhsprogram.com/publications/publication-dhsg1-dhs-questi onnaires-and-manuals.cfm
The Guide to DHS Statistics and The Standard Recode Manual http:// dhsprogram.com/publications/publication-dhsg4-dhs-questionna ires-and-manuals.cfm
are excellent resources for working with DHS data.
If you have additional questions, please feel free to post again.
Thank you!
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