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Age of marriage variable/stata date problem [message #15346] Mon, 02 July 2018 17:55 Go to next message
louis.weimer11@gmail.com
Messages: 8
Registered: October 2017
Location: Phoenix
Member
I am interested in finding a variable for a woman's age at marriage for Egypt's 2014 DHS in the Individual Recode. I have been unable to find this specific variable, but noticed that there are two other variables that could be used to infer it--date when birth given to first child, and number of months between marriage and first child. The problem I'm having is that the former doesn't seem to be reading into the data correctly. When reading the .dta file into R and also the sas dataset into a sas session, the values for the date of first child birth variable are entirely numeric and range from 943 to 1374. Do you know of either a.) a variable in the Individual recode that directly captures the date of marriage information, or b.) why the date of first childbirth variable doesn't turn up as a date in either r or SAS?
Re: Age of marriage variable/stata date problem [message #15372 is a reply to message #15346] Sun, 08 July 2018 20:58 Go to previous message
kingx025 is currently offline  kingx025
Messages: 95
Registered: August 2016
Location: Minneapolis. Minnesota
Senior Member
I checked in IPUMS-DHS, looking in the variable group Marriage and Cohabitation and limiting samples to Egypt 2014.

The following variable seems likely to answer your question:
V511 (AGEFRSTMAR) Age at first marriage or cohabitation
https://www.idhsdata.org/idhs-action/variables/AGEFRSTMAR#co des_section

There is also V509 (MAR1STCMC), Date of first marriage expressed in century months
https://www.idhsdata.org/idhs-action/variables/MAR1STCMC#des cription_section
and variables on the calendar month and year of the date of first marriage (V507 and V508)

There is also a variable on age at first marriage contract, available for Egyptian samples and 2 Indian samples. Because there is no standard name for this variable, IPUMS-DHS supplies just a single name, MARCON1STAGE, but I suspect you want to know age when cohabitation began instead.

Data from the individual recode file for Egypt 2014 are included in IPUMS-DHS (choose women as the unit of analysis and select EG2014 as your sample of interest). You can select the variables you need for a customized data file and choose SAS as the format for your file (if that is your preferred format) and proceed with your analysis. Just log in to www.idhsdata.org with your DHS user name and password.

Miriam King


Dr. Miriam King
IPUMS-DHS Project Manager (www.idhsdata.org)
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