In 1999, The DHS Program released the first STATcompiler. It was designed to replicate the tables in the tabulation plan of the DHS final reports at the time. Now, more than 15 years later, that database has reached “antique” status. While the user interface did get an overhaul in 2011, technology has continued to move […]
If you’ve recently written an academic paper, you probably used reference management software, such as Endnote, Zotero, Mendeley, or RefWorks, to organize and import your references. And if you’re a DHS data user, you probably have a handful of DHS analytical, comparative, or methodological reports that you regularly refer to. Now, you can download our […]
For 30 years, The DHS Program has asked women hundreds of questions about their utilization of various health care services, including family planning, antenatal and delivery care, vaccination and treatment of sick children, malaria treatment, and HIV prevention and treatment. In 1999, The DHS Program started collecting facility-level data through the Service Provision Assessment (SPA) […]
Have you ever wished that you could download just one dataset for multiple surveys with all of the data you want for your analysis in one file? And that the dataset wasn’t so huge and overwhelming? And that the variables in the dataset were all harmonized? The Minnesota Population Center has been working on the Integrated […]
At this year’s Population Association of America (PAA) conference, The DHS Program staff (along with co-authors from JSI and Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs) presented the first paper in the data visualization session. It was called “Why Demographers Need to be Data Visualization Experts.” It appears we were preaching to the choir. While this […]
Very few countries have as much experience with The DHS Program as Egypt. Since 1988, Egypt has implemented seven standard DHS surveys, three Interim Surveys, one In-Depth Study, and two Service Provision Assessment Surveys (SPA). Data collection is almost completed for a Health Indicator Survey (HIS), and plans are underway to start another SPA. So any […]
The DHS Program regularly gets questions from users about sampling and weighting. “How do I apply sample weights in multilevel analyses?” or “What is the difference between self weighting data and non-self weighting data?” On June 3, 2015, three DHS experts will answer users’ questions on “Weights and other adjustments for the survey design” in […]
In 2006 I was in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, preparing for the release of the 2005 Ethiopia Demographic and Health Survey (EDHS). In the days leading up to the national seminar and launch of the EDHS report, two separate individuals approached me at my hotel, both looking for an “advance copy” of the report. One was writing a […]
By Guillermo Rojas The survey process at The DHS Program takes an average of 18-20 months and goes through several steps: survey preparation and questionnaire design, training and fieldwork, data processing, and finally, writing the final report and dissemination. But how do the data get from respondents’ households into the tables you see in the […]
By Clara Burgert The first DHS survey to use geographic location data was the 1996 Benin DHS. At that time, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Day didn’t even exist (it was first started in 1999)! But over the years, we’ve collected location data in more and more surveys—over 120 to date. Our offerings in terms of […]