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Home » Topics » Mortality » Pregnancy duration from vcal_1 (India, IAKR7EFL.DTA, NFHS-5 2019-2021)
Pregnancy duration from vcal_1 [message #30298] Wed, 30 October 2024 12:04 Go to previous message
rghosh is currently offline  rghosh
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Registered: October 2024
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India, IAKR7EFL.DTA, NFHS-5 2019-2021

I am interested to identify all live and stillbirths that occurred in the 5 years prior to the month of the survey. I have merged and working with the vcal_1 variable from the birth history because that is the only way to at least get the month of pregnancy preceding each birth. In other words, I would like to obtain all births and the corresponding gestational age at birth. I read in another post about using Ps for the Ts only, but there are Bs too in vcal_1.

My first question, is using the vcal_1 to obtain pregnancy duration the right approach.

Second, in the vcal_1 there are gaps on the very left. I am interpreting each space as the difference between the very last month of survey and the month when a participant was interviewed. So, if there are 4 spaces on the left of the very first letter/number in vcal_1 for participant 1, that means she was interviewed on the 5th last months of NFHS-5 survey.

Third, since there are more characters than 60 in vcal_1, excluding spaces, I am truncating at 59 to identify all the births and stillbirths based on B or T, respectively. Next, I plan to count the Ps following the B and T to get the gestational month of the corresponding pregnancy. If I understand the data correctly, this should give me the births and the gestational age for all births in the 5 years preceding the month of the survey.

Fourth, I am lost when I see the bord and bidx variables and compare them with the livebirths identified using vcal_1. I am aware that there is a direct variable s234 that identifies the stillbirths but I want to get the gest. age as well.

Any suggestion will be greatly appreciated.

Best regards
Rakesh
 
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