Codes
This variable is not available for any of the currently selected samples.
Description
CALPREG_LENGTH reports the length of a non-truncated pregnancy occurring during the calendar period. The month of the event that ended the pregnancy--when the woman gave birth or had a pregnancy termination (abortion, miscarriage, or stillbirth)--contributes one month to CALPREG_LENGTH.
Consider, for example, the case of a woman with calendar data reporting eight consecutive months of pregnancy followed by a month in which she gave birth. This pregnancy would have a value of 9 in CALPREG_LENGTH, since the woman was of course pregnant in the month she gave birth. Similarly, a woman who had calendar data reporting three consecutive months of pregnancy followed by a pregnancy termination (abortion, miscarriage, or stillbirth) would have a value of 4 months for that pregnancy, by summing the reported months of pregnancy plus the termination month.
CALPREG_LENGTH is calculated only for non-truncated pregnancies, that is, for pregnancies for which the reported information was not censored by (potentially) beginning before the start of the calendar period or continuing after the end of the calendar period.
If, for example, a woman's calendar data begins with a report of six months of pregnancy followed by a birth, she may have had a premature birth (delivering in her seventh month since conception) or she may have been pregnant during the two months prior to the start of the calendar period, giving birth in her ninth month of pregnancy. This left-censored pregnancy is not included in CALPREG_LENGTH. In this case, every month of the pregnancy, including the month of birth, has an affirmative code of "1" in CALPREG_LC, which flags all months of a left-censored pregnancy.
Similarly, if a woman is reported as pregnant during her final (most recent) month during the calendar period, all months of that pregnancy are excluded from CALPREG_LENGTH, since we do not know how long the pregnancy continued after the survey interview. A right-censored pregnancy like this has an affirmative code of "1" in CALPREG_RC, which flags all months of a right-censored pregnancy. Note that a pregnancy reported to have ended in a birth or termination during the month of interview would not be excluded from CALPREG_LENGTH, since the birth or termination ended the pregnancy during the calendar period.
The related variable CALPREG_LONG flags all months of a continuous, non-truncated pregnancy reported to have lasted more than nine months (including the month of birth or termination ending the pregnancy). An affirmative (code 1) value in CALPREG_LONG, indicating that the pregnancy continued for more than 9 months, may result from respondent error, error on the part of the interviewer recording the response, or data entry error. Such a prolonged pregnancy may also indicate delayed delivery or error in the calculation of when the pregnancy began. IPUMS DHS leaves it up to individual researchers to decide how to handle such cases. The data in CALPREG_LENGTH also allows researchers to set their own cutoff point (e.g., pregnancy lasted more than 10 months) for excluding all or some of the months of a pregnancy due to misreporting of its length.
