Your Questions on Weighting Answered: The DHS Program User Forum and Webinar

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 our first ever live webinar. Drs. Tom Pullum, Ruilin Ren, and Mahmoud Elkasabi will be discussing common questions about sampling and weighting in DHS data collection and analysis.

Launched in 2013, The DHS Program User Forum was created to provide a transparent discussion platform for users of DHS data to ask questions and receive feedback from the broader community and DHS Program staff. To date, more than 1,700 users have registered on the user forum and posted over 3,000 messages. To quote one registered user:

“The forum is helping millions of DHS data users around the world to understand data and sort data management issues. I personally managed to merge DHS data with the help of the forum contributor.”

Members can post questions in dozens of threads in three main categories: Topics (i.e. child health, mortality, and wealth index), Countries (India and Bangladesh are currently  the most active), or Data (merging, sampling and weighting, geographic data, dataset use
in Stata and SPSS). While we encourage users to answer each other’s questions, The DHS Program staff  members do moderate the forum and provide answers when others do not. But increasingly, members are often able to find the answer to their question simply by searching the 3,000+ messages that are already in the forum. Registered users say:

“I’m likely to post again to the User Forum because, when I post not only do I get a quick and helpful answer, but also it lets me see what other users have posted and been given as answers, which opens my eyes and mind to other future research.”

Participate in the User Forum and the Webinar on June 3, 2015
To post a question on weighting for the webinar, simply visit the User Forum thread “Sampling and Weighting Webinar June 2015.” Then, on June 3, 2015, at 10am EST (UTC/GMT-4) join us live in our Adobe Connect room. A recording of the webinar will be available on the User Forum for those who cannot participate live, and a summary of the questions and answers will also be entered into the User Forum as individual messages for future reference.