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Home » Countries » Nepal » Year and Month Modification/Adjustment: Birth (b1, b2) & Survey (v006, v007, v008) (Question how to change Nepal calendar standard calendar)
Year and Month Modification/Adjustment: Birth (b1, b2) & Survey (v006, v007, v008) [message #24291] Wed, 13 April 2022 03:10 Go to next message
takanome is currently offline  takanome
Messages: 3
Registered: April 2022
Member
Currently, I am using Nepal DHS data from 2001, 2006, 2011, and 2016.
I realized all date-related variables are encoded using the Nepal calendar.

At the moment, I use [1] the year-month of the survey (v006 & v007) and [2] the year-month of the birth of children (b1 & b2).

Question [1]
When making variables of survey year and survey month, can I use the v008 (date of interview, cmc) following the Standard Recode Manual?
I am not sure whether they (information below) are reliable.
Reference:
https://www.dhsprogram.com/publications/publication-DHSG4-DH S-Questionnaires-and-Manuals.cfm
https://userforum.dhsprogram.com/index.php?t=msg&goto=14 640&S=Google (<-- Is this method applicable?)

Previous posts suggested the use of a converter (eg https://www.ashesh.com.np/nepali-date-converter.php), but for the year and month of the survey, as date is not provided, this does not provide us an accurate conversion.

Question [2]
Similarly, I would like to know how to convert the year and month of children's birth?


In this project, I use Stata for data management. Therefore, I would highly appreciate it if you could provide me a Stata code to modify these variables. (I am also a R user, and if you have R code but not Stata, I would also appreciate R code.)
Re: Year and Month Modification/Adjustment: Birth (b1, b2) & Survey (v006, v007, v008) [message #24307 is a reply to message #24291] Fri, 15 April 2022 16:04 Go to previous messageGo to next message
admin is currently offline  admin
Messages: 50
Registered: November 2012
Senior Member
Administrator
Following is response from DHS Research & Data Analysis Director, Tom Pullum:

All dates in the data files for Ethiopia, Nepal, and Afghanistan are in the calendars for those countries. They are internally consistent. If you start replacing them, it is likely that you will not get them all and inconsistencies will develop. You CAN change the variables that give dates in century month codes (cmc) with lines such as these:

rename hv008 hv008_original
gen hv008=hv008_original-681

You can then reconstruct month and year (e.g. hv006 and hv007; cmc=1 is still the first month of 1900 in the respective calendars) but there will inevitably be errors.

The dates of fieldwork are provided in the Gregorian calendar in the first chapter of the final report for each survey. I strongly suggest that you not change the dates in the data files, and only use the difference in dates to identify the dates of fieldwork and the reference dates/intervals for the rates and other estimates AFTER your analysis has been completed.


We now have repositories of code written in Stata and SPSS available on Github. Please reference these code repositories as a resource for code for matching or calculating DHS indicators. The code repositories can be found at:

https://github.com/DHSProgram/DHS-Indicators-Stata
https://github.com/DHSProgram/DHS-Indicators-SPSS

Re: Year and Month Modification/Adjustment: Birth (b1, b2) & Survey (v006, v007, v008) [message #24313 is a reply to message #24307] Mon, 18 April 2022 21:57 Go to previous message
takanome is currently offline  takanome
Messages: 3
Registered: April 2022
Member
Thank you for your detailed explanation.

I did not mention it, but my study also uses DHS data from other countries and other GIS data that will be linked with DHS data.
To make the main dataset (and conduct analysis), including the Nepal DHS, I need year and month in the standard calendar. The year and month of the survey and birth are essential to make key geographical variables.

Therefore, does this mean that I cannot use Nepal DHS because the year and month cannot be converted to the standard calendar accurately (without errors/miscalculations)?
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