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Age at first birth [message #28475]

Mon, 15 January 2024 08:51

Mukesh
Messages: 13
Registered: March 2019

Member

From the KR file of NFHS 4, I am trying to generate a variable for the mother's who gave first birth before the age of 18.

	recode v212 (.=0) (0/17 = 1 "yes") (18/49 = 0 "no"), gen (fe_afb_18)
	replace fe_afb_18 = . if v012<18
	label var fe_afb_18 "First birth by age 18"

Why in DHS indicator STATA code at GitHub, https://github.com/DHSProgram/DHS-Indicators-Stata/blob/6c05 87628814ea5ad478ce96b7f91985465a48e3/Chap05_FE/FE_FERT.do, replace [replace fe_afb_18 = . if v012<18]?

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Re: Age at first birth [message #28497 is a reply to message #28475]

Fri, 19 January 2024 09:10

Janet-DHS
Messages: 893
Registered: April 2022

Senior Member

Following is a response from DHS staff member, Tom Pullum:

In Stata, a dot means "Not Applicable" or NA. If a woman's current age is less that 18, then she has had less than full exposure to the risk of having a birth before age 18 (that is, before her 18th birthday). Coding the outcome with a dot is just a way of removing those women from the calculation, and restricting the calculation to women who have had full exposure to risk.

In the terminology of hazard models, these young women are censored, or their exposure is censored. Some statistical models would allow you to include them, because they have had partial exposure, and they do provide some information, but for this simple calculation we simply drop them.

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