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Re: What does it means M2A$1 - DHS Women's dataset [message #12861 is a reply to message #12857] Tue, 25 July 2017 07:59 Go to previous messageGo to previous message
Bridgette-DHS is currently offline  Bridgette-DHS
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Registered: February 2013
Senior Member

Following is a response from Senior DHS Stata Specialist, Tom Pullum:

These kinds of variables in the IR file are limited to births in the past five years and are indexed such that suffix _1 refers to the most recent birth, _2 refers to the next most recent birth, etc., up to a maximum of six births in the past five years. If a woman had no births in the past five years, then they are all NA. If she had only one, then _2 through _6 are NA, etc. For this specific variable you really get no information from _2 through _6, even for women with more than one birth in the past five years, so you should only use _1.

When looking into this sort of thing I strongly recommend that you open the file and actually look at the frequency distributions for the variables. It would then be clear that what you should use is _1.

 
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