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Re: Stata do file for U5 mortality analysis [message #305 is a reply to message #272] Sat, 13 April 2013 01:44 Go to previous messageGo to previous message
Reduced-For(u)m
Messages: 292
Registered: March 2013
Senior Member


I might have some code that I could adapt, or at least present in some way that gets the gist of the program, but it would take some work (they are imbedded in much longer .do files). What kind of U5 mortality rates were you hoping to compute? There are a few ways and they all have slightly different interpretations, and I don't use the standard DHS method (not because mine is better, it was just better suited to the task I had at hand).

The DHS U5 mortality rates come from (I think) estimating age-period-specific mortality probabilities, and then computing the probability that a child doesn't die before age 5. The assumption here is that the age-mortality profile is not shifting over time (so the 36 month old kids born 3 years before the survey are a good representation of mortality chances kids born today will face in 3 years). The complicated part about this involves cohort-timing and age-timing stuff, where they use cohort level survival ratios but some cohorts end up in different age groups and you have to like use a fraction of that cohort. I'm still digesting it, but the DHS manual covers it here on page 90-94: http://www.measuredhs.com/pubs/pdf/DHSG1/Guide_to_DHS_Statis tics_29Oct2012_DHSG1.pdf

I haven't done that. I've done a cohort-level estimation, which they describe as option 2 on page 91. You just compute the fraction of kids born in any year who died before they turned some age. But for U5 it can be a problem (I'm mostly concerned with U1), because you can only get rates starting 5 years before the survey - a kid has to live to age 5 until you know if s/he will survive to age 5 for sure. This method is, for me, more parsimonious, but it won't help if you want a u5 mortality rate estimate for 2010.

Of course, you can always just take the total number of births in the birth history and divide by total number of deaths (option 1 page 91), and that will estimate a parameter that can be compared across surveys, but it is not a U5 mortality rate exactly, since a lot of the kids in the survey haven't lived 5 years yet, so we don't know if they will survive or not later on.

So...which method were you trying to do, or what are you hoping to use the rate for?
 
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