Codes
This variable is not available for any of the currently selected samples.
Description
CALBIRTH is a dichotomous variable (0 for no, 1 for yes) indicating whether the woman had a live birth during the month.
Note that a woman was also pregnant during the month that she gave birth, so eight months of pregnancy followed by a live birth represents a 9-month pregnancy. Because only a single reproductive event is listed in VCAL_1 for a given calendar month, only the birth is recorded for the month with both a pregnancy and a live birth.
Under the same logic (a single reproductive event assigned to each month), a woman who gave birth to twins or triplets, or who had a live birth plus a stillbirth, gets the same birth code in a month as a woman who had a single live birth.
For the following summary variables, IPUMS DHS includes the month of birth when calculating the duration of the pregnancy:
Some samples include cases coded "9" for "NIU (not in universe) or missing response" for CALBIRTH. Researchers may wish to recode such cases as "No" (code 0) in CALBIRTH. Users may wish to incorporate information from women's variables such as BIRTHSIN5YRS (V208, Number of births in last 5 years) when deciding whether to recode these cases with missing data.
Researchers should also keep in mind that cases in CALBIRTH with missing data are of two types: 1) months with missing data (blank responses) for some months, for women who had meaningful responses for at least one month during the calendar period, for samples that collected data on births, pregnancies, terminations, and contraceptive use; and 2) months with missing data for women who had no months with meaningful (non-missing) responses during the calendar period. Cases with type 2 errors should be treated as "Not in universe" only (completely missing and thus with wholly unknown values) and can be identified by having code "99" in CALBIRTH_TOTAL.
Comparability
Apart from universe differences, CALBIRTH is largely comparable across samples.
For discussion of differences in the meaning of "Missing data" across samples for this variable, see the variable description.
Comparability - Standard DHS
CALBIRTH is a standard variable based on string data from VCAL_1, for samples that collected calendar data for women of childbearing age.
