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Calculation of child marriage rates and v511 from PR dataset [message #22893] Sun, 30 May 2021 07:45 Go to next message
albena is currently offline  albena
Messages: 12
Registered: February 2015
Member
Dear DHS team,

I am using your latest DHS for a number of countries to calculate child marriage rates. I am using the fact that in your sample you have women until the age of 49 as this enables me to calculate the exact timing of child marriage that goes back in Tim. This will be based on the year when the DHS was conducted and the year of birth of the respondent.

I have a concrete Stata code for this: gen yearcm = year - hv105 + 18. // 'year' here is the year of the DHS data, hv105 is the age of the respondent

This gives me the exact calendar year when the child marriage happened.

Next, I have to calculate the child marriage rates (in %) for the given calendar years.

I also have a Stata code for this (the v511 is from the PR dataset):

gen mbefore18 = 1 if v511 < 18. // v511 is the age at first co-habitation
replace mbefore18 = 0 if v511 >=1 8

bysort yearcm: egen cm = mean(mbefore18)


I have some doubts about my calculation, which comes from the v511. When I tabulate this variable, I also see that the age of first cohabitation can be 40 years. I am therefore not sure whether this variable could be understood by the respondents in a different light - for example, if they remarried, what was the age they first started cohabiting with their new partner. Otherwise for me it is a bit difficult to interpret this variable. The example with the age of 40 years I give you is not just one outlier and I have seen it in the datasets for different countries. Could you please comment on the v511 variable, how should I understand it, and can I use it in my calculation the way I reported it to you?

Do you maybe have some other way of calculating child marriage rates? I found a clarification on the median age at marriage, but this is different from what I need to calculate: https://dhsprogram.com/data/Guide-to-DHS-Statistics/Age_at_F irst_Marriage.htm

Thank you very much for your advices!

Albena
Re: Calculation of child marriage rates and v511 from PR dataset [message #22902 is a reply to message #22893] Tue, 01 June 2021 08:37 Go to previous message
Bridgette-DHS is currently offline  Bridgette-DHS
Messages: 3214
Registered: February 2013
Senior Member

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

The proportion of women married before age 18 is a standard DHS indicator in chapter 4 of the report. The coding is given on our GitHub site (https://github.com/DHSProgram/DHS-Indicators-Stata). You should be able to find what you want there. If you want to calculate this specific for calendar year of birth (v010) you can do that. The calculation should be restricted to women who are already age 18+ at the time of the survey. You should not need to use the date of the survey.

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