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Number of under five children in the family [message #11412] Fri, 16 December 2016 12:41 Go to next message
user is currently offline  user
Messages: 11
Registered: March 2014
Member
Hello there,

I was trying to calculate the association between children's Height for age Z score and number of under five children in the family. When i tabulate the variable hv014, it gives following result:

number of
children 5
and under
(de jure) Freq. Percent Cum.

0 22,077 23.01 23.01
1 23,493 24.48 47.49
2 30,452 31.74 79.23
3 15,197 15.84 95.07
4 3,147 3.28 98.35
5 985 1.03 99.38
6 417 0.43 99.81
7 106 0.11 99.92
8 37 0.04 99.96
9 18 0.02 99.98
10 20 0.02 100.00

Total 95,949 100.00

In this case, what does the zero "0" number of children mean? if i want to categorize the response into "0" "1-2" and ">2" children how should i interpret the result? or should i simply exclude the observations with zero children in this case? Can someone please guide me on this? Any help will be really appreciated.

Thank you very much.

Best Regards
Re: Number of under five children in the family [message #11442 is a reply to message #11412] Wed, 21 December 2016 16:30 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Trevor-DHS is currently offline  Trevor-DHS
Messages: 787
Registered: January 2013
Senior Member
When you post on the forum, please state which survey and which dataset you are working with.
Re: Number of under five children in the family [message #11444 is a reply to message #11442] Wed, 21 December 2016 23:27 Go to previous messageGo to next message
user is currently offline  user
Messages: 11
Registered: March 2014
Member
Hi Trevor,

Sorry for the confusion and thank you for your reply.

I am using the PR file from Nepal Demographic and Health Survey (NDHS 2011)


use "C:\Users..............\NPPR60FL.DTA"
*Declaring Survey data
gen finalwt=hv005/1000000
svyset hv001 [pweight=finalwt], strata(hv022) vce(linearized) singleunit(missing) || hv002

*DEPENDENT VARIABLE
* Calculation of Stunting (Height for Age)
gen HAZ=hc70
replace HAZ=. if HAZ>=9996
gen stunting= HAZ
replace stunting=0 if HAZ ~=.
replace stunting=1 if HAZ<-200
svy: tab hv014 stunting if hv103==1

Which gives result,


number of
children
5 and
under (de stunting
jure) 0 1 Total

0 .0352 .0105 .0457
1 .2659 .1641 .43
2 .2236 .1709 .3946
3 .0541 .0505 .1046
4 .0144 .0086 .023
5 .0017 4.1e-04 .0021

Total .595 .405 1


Now i am confused about the correct interpretation of the first row of the table (distribution of stunting among the family with "0" under five children) and i need help.

Thank you for your help.
Best,
Re: Number of under five children in the family [message #11537 is a reply to message #11444] Mon, 09 January 2017 16:38 Go to previous message
Trevor-DHS is currently offline  Trevor-DHS
Messages: 787
Registered: January 2013
Senior Member
When we tabulate stunting in DHS we do this for the de facto population (those children who, in fact, stayed in the household the previous night - hv103==1). Some of these children may not be de jure residents of the household (usual residents), but rather visitors to the household who stayed the previous night. When you then disaggregate the results by the total number of de jure (usual) residents under the age of 5, then you might find some households that had some de facto children under age 5 (those who stayed in the household the previous night), but no de jure residents. I think I would recommend that if you are analyzing the number of de facto children then I suggest using the total number of de facto children under 5 instead of the total number of de jure children under the age of 5, but that depends on the aim of your analysis.
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