| Re: Total females age 15-49 in the country at the time of the survey [message #4039 is a reply to message #4038] |
Thu, 19 March 2015 20:26   |
Reduced-For(u)m
Messages: 292
Registered: March 2013
|
Senior Member |
|
|
I asked about the number of women you used because the de-normalizing process essentially re-scales the weights away from summing up to total sample size and to summing up to number of women the survey represents (this is what allows it to make the weights representational across countries). That 9m number should correspond to something like the number of women in that age group in all your countries, if you are doing the calculation right.
Also - the sum of the weights doesn't really matter within any one survey - you are using them for probability proportioning. My usual strategy is to just de-normalize such that the weights in each survey sum to 1 (new weight = oldweight/sum-of-weights). This makes each survey in total have the same weight in cross-country regressions. The DHS method essentially weights each individual survey by the number of (in this case) women aged 15-49 in each country.
But the main point is that interpreting the weighted averages as a number of observations is the wrong way to think about it. You want to think about it as doing two things: within survey it is distributing weight based on probability of selection; between surveys it is weighting by population.
|
|
|
|
The DHS Program User Forum
Members
Search
Help
Register
Login
Home
