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Re: Calculating fertility rates [message #207 is a reply to message #107] Tue, 26 March 2013 16:22 Go to previous messageGo to previous message
Reduced-For(u)m
Messages: 292
Registered: March 2013
Senior Member


Not sure if these suggestions will help, but thought I'd mention a couple of tricky parts.

First, did you divide all the weights by 1000000? It shouldn't make much of a difference, but I think it could lead to mathematically slightly different answers if Stata is trying to deal with really big weight numbers. Also, how are you actually weighting these? (I don't really know exactly how you should, other than it might involve the all woman factor, but seems like you'd have to re-calculate the denominator and numerator by summing across woman-years times weight instead of just the woman-years).

Second, getting the timing so that women-years are properly balanced between age-groups is tricky. The DHS method seems to truncate age to age-in-round-years, so maybe you are rounding differently than they do.

Third, there is another approach to calculating TFRs (and age-specific rates) that is a "person period" approach. You can find a discussion here http://paa2012.princeton.edu/papers/122446 but I don't think the package is totally ready yet (once it is, that will be handy). This will almost certainly not return the DHS numbers, and the interpretation is probably slightly different, but it's not clear to me that the DHS numbers are in any sense "better" than what you'd get from this method.

In general, it seems to be pretty hard to get exactly the numbers that the DHS gets. If yours are not meaningfully different (economically/epidemilogically/etc) from the published ones, it might just be an alogrythm thing about how Stata computes things and uses weights.

If you post a .do file, I might be able to take a look. I've found the process difficult myself, and maybe I could learn something from how you are trying to do it. Hope something here was helpful.
 
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