IPUMS DHS Calendar Data Overview

For many surveys, DHS interviewers collect calendar data, or reproductive calendar data, from women of childbearing age. These calendar data are retrospective data covering at least the preceding 5 years (although the length of the calendar varies from woman to woman, depending on the month of interview). The data provide a month-by-month history of a woman's reproductive events during her calendar period.

For every month of the calendar period, the calendar data document whether a woman gave birth, was pregnant, or terminated a pregnancy. For many samples, the monthly record also indicates whether the woman used a (specified) contraceptive method and, if she stopped using a contraceptive method, the reason for stopping. While these events represent the core of the calendar data, some samples supply additional types of calendar data, including: marital status, moves and types of communities, employment, and specific type of pregnancy termination (abortion, miscarriage, or stillbirth). IPUMS DHS provides the calendar data as a separate unit of analysis, referred to as "woman months."

You can create a customized data file with calendar data through the IPUMS DHS extract system. Log in with your DHS username and password and choose woman-months as the unit of analysis. Each observation will be a month for the five years prior to interview by women of childbearing age. Along with the calendar variables described in this document, you can include other variables describing the woman in your customized data file (such as her age, education level, or religion).

The image below, taken from the final report for the Bangladesh 2014 survey, reproduces the form the interviewer fills in while collecting the calendar data, with the country-specific codes used on the left. Here, the two columns collect data on two topics: births, pregnancies, and contraceptive use; and reason for discontinuing contraceptive use.

For information on the question sequence the interviewer uses to collect the calendar data and how the responses are recorded during the interview, consult modules 1 and 2 of The DHS Program's "Contraceptive Calendar Tutorial"

The calendar data available from IPUMS DHS are recoded from the standard coding system for DHS Phase VII as a starting point. IPUMS DHS staff consulted final reports to determine the meaning of country-specific responses outside the standard coding system and gave numeric codes to all responses.