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Forum: Fertility
 Topic: Calculating fertility rates
Re: Calculating fertility rates [message #28836 is a reply to message #28830] Mon, 18 March 2024 05:20
schoumaker is currently offline  schoumaker
Messages: 65
Registered: May 2013
Location: Belgium
Senior Member
Hello,
Which files did you use ? Did you use individual recode data files ? Did you just append them, and ran tfr ? Or did you do something else ?

In general, I would not recommand using tfr2 on a multicountry file. If you send me more information, I can look at it.

In any case, you would have to be careful about

- the use of the correct files (IR)
- the dates of the surveys which will differ - and would need to be taken care of.
- the weights, especially if you want to account for different population sizes.
- possibly the use of all-women factors, which may be necessary in some surveys and not in others.

Best regards,

Bruno Schoumaker




Bruno Schoumaker
Centre for Demographic Research
Université catholique de Louvain
Re: Calculating fertility rates [message #28842 is a reply to message #28836] Mon, 18 March 2024 08:58
Astride is currently offline  Astride
Messages: 3
Registered: March 2024
Member
Hello,

I used IR files and i combined it for 21 countries which are Afrique du Sud Burkina Faso Gabon Gambie Ghana Sénégal Cameroun Mali Nigéria Tanzanie Ouganda Rwanda Sierra Leone Bénin Zambie Zimbabwe Ethiopie Madagascar Burundi Angola
Then i ran TFR2.

i use the last DHS data of each country

Thanks for help
Re: Calculating fertility rates [message #28843 is a reply to message #28842] Mon, 18 March 2024 13:38
schoumaker is currently offline  schoumaker
Messages: 65
Registered: May 2013
Location: Belgium
Senior Member
Thank you for your reply. I think you should avoid doing this with tfr2, which was not conceived for this type of analyses.

Given that the survey dates differ may widely (even with the most recent surveys), your fertility rates will refer to different periods. Moreover, the Ethiopia survey uses another calendar, that needs to be takes into account. In addition, if you want to obtain fertility rates for the entire set of countries, youd would need to compute and use weights that reflect the size of the women's population in these countries.

Maybe a more careful approach would be to use tabexp to compute the number of births and exposure by age groups, for each survey separately, and combine them afterwards (with weights, and having in mind that they refer to different time periods). tabexp (and tfr2) also allow defining the end year of the estmation period. For instance, if you want compute rates for the 3 years up to 2019 (included), you can use tfr2, length(3) endy(2019), or tabexp, length(3) endy(2019). This makes it possible to compute rates for the same time periods in various surveys, but you would lose some cases at higher ages in some surveys.

Best regards,

Bruno


Bruno Schoumaker
Centre for Demographic Research
Université catholique de Louvain



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