IPUMS Global Health – Use It for Good

Constructing comparable intimate partner violence indicators across the DHS, MICS, and PMA health surveys

September 17, 2024September 16, 2024 by mpcblog

By Miriam King, Anna Bolgrien, Mehr Munir, and Devon Kristiansen

The three data series comprising IPUMS Global Health—IPUMS DHS, IPUMS PMA, and IPUMS MICS—contain intersecting subjects related to women’s and children’s health, while retaining distinct patterns of temporal and geographic coverage. This content overlap opens the door to combining harmonized data across the three surveys, to extend time series and/or increase the number of countries in comparative analyses. However, there are important yet subtle differences between these survey types, in sample frames, questionnaire wording, and variable responses and universes, which require cautious consideration. As the example below demonstrates, researchers must use extra care to avoid errors when combining data across IPUMS DHS, MICS, and PMA.

A July 2024 article in the Journal of Public Health Policy, “Constructing Comparable Intimate Partner Violence Indicators across DHS, MICS, and PMA Health Surveys,” describes some challenges and solutions to combining data across these IPUMS databases, using measures of intimate partner violence as an example. The piece, authored by Devon Kristiansen and colleagues at IPUMS, notes two necessary steps in combining data across survey types:

Identify and combine only variables with similar question wording
Adjust the samples to include only comparable subpopulations

Harmonized Malaria Indicator Survey (MIS) Data Now in IPUMS DHS

September 5, 2024September 3, 2024 by mpcblog

By Miriam King, Senior Research Scientist

Malaria is a pressing global health problem, with nearly 250 million malaria cases in 2022, according to the World Health Organization. Approximately 95 percent of malaria deaths were in Africa, with three-quarters of those deaths to children under 5. Climate change is increasing the transmission of mosquito-borne diseases, such as malaria. When IPUMS DHS recently received supplemental funding to support research on Climate Change Effects on Health, adding data on malaria was a top priority. Specifically, IPUMS DHS chose to integrate data from the DHS Malaria Indicator Surveys (MIS).

MIS have been fielded in nearly 30 African countries during the twenty-first century. Developed under an international partnership coordinating efforts to fight malaria, MIS surveys include some standard DHS variables on topics such as demographics, fertility, and household characteristics. MIS questionnaires also include hundreds of questions related to malaria. People’s knowledge about malaria causes, symptoms, and prevention; use of bednets; diagnosis and treatment of malaria, especially for pregnant women and children; exposure to public health messaging; and diagnostic blood testing for malaria in children under 5 are among the topics covered.

Map of Africa with the countries with MIS data in IPUMS DHS filled in with purple — Figure 1: Countries with MIS Data in IPUMS DHS

IPUMS DHS users now have access to harmonized data from 38 MIS samples, with geographic coverage shown in Figure 1. We prioritized harmonizing responses to MIS questions that matched variables already in the IPUMS DHS database, for approximately 700 widely available variables.

IPUMS PMA Longitudinal Data

March 15, 2022March 15, 2022 by mpcblog

By Devon Kristiansen

When Performance Monitoring for Action (PMA) initiated data collection in 2013, the survey design was a high-frequency, cross-sectional series with a focus on family planning, water, and sanitation indicators. Beginning in 2019, PMA refocused on reproductive and sexual health, and adjusted the survey design to add a contraceptive calendar and a longitudinal panel of women of childbearing age to observe contraceptive and fertility dynamics.

In order help researchers leverage the rich data from the redesigned PMA, IPUMS PMA has updated its online data dissemination system to provide longitudinal data in long form or wide form, delivering data files that link the women’s panel records.

The longitudinal data are designed to allow for analysis of contraceptive uptake, discontinuation, and method switching, as well as changes in fertility intentions and actualization over time. However, the redesigned survey also includes many new questions, including questions about domestic violence, women’s economic empowerment, abortion, health care access during COVID-19, and many other topics.

Reproductive Calendar Data Now Available from IPUMS DHS

March 1, 2022 by mpcblog

By Miriam L. King

IPUMS DHS has released data for a new unit of analysis, woman-months, based on retrospective calendar data offering a month-to-month history of a woman’s reproductive events during the preceding five years.

Woman Months: Each record will be a woman-month from respective calendar data.

The calendar data document for every month whether a woman gave birth, was pregnant, or terminated a pregnancy. For most samples, the monthly record also indicates whether the woman used a (specified) contraceptive method and her the reason for stopping use of the method. Some samples also collect information on the woman’s union status, employment, and the type of pregnancy termination.

Visualizing IPUMS Global Health with Storymaps

September 29, 2021June 23, 2021 by mpcblog

By Matt Gunther

IPUMS data are a great research resource; they are also widely used by faculty for teaching students about using data to tell stories. This blog post, adapted from the IPUMS PMA Data Analysis Hub blog series, highlights work from students using IPUMS Global Health data.

This semester, students in the Global Health Survey Analysis course at the University of Minnesota used an amazing tool called StoryMaps to develop interactive narratives exploring different topics related to family planning. StoryMaps have been used in both the undergraduate and graduate curriculum throughout the College of Liberal Arts and beyond – we encourage you to check out the full gallery of student projects here!

IPUMS Announces 2020 Research Award Recipients

September 29, 2021May 17, 2021 by mpcblog

IPUMS is excited to announce the winners of its annual IPUMS Research Awards. These awards honor the best-published research and nominated graduate student papers from 2020 that used IPUMS data to advance or deepen our understanding of social and demographic processes.

IPUMS, developed by and housed at the University of Minnesota, is the world’s largest individual-level population database, providing harmonized data on people in the U.S. and around the world to researchers at no cost.

There are six award categories, and each is tied to the following IPUMS projects:

IPUMS USA, providing data from the U.S. decennial censuses, the American Community Survey, and IPUMS CPS from 1850 to the present.
IPUMS International, providing harmonized data contributed by more than 100 international statistical office partners; it currently includes information on 500 million people in more than 200 censuses from around the world, from 1960 forward.
IPUMS Health Surveys, which makes available the U.S. National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) and the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS).
IPUMS Spatial, covering IPUMS NHGIS and IPUMS Terra. NHGIS includes GIS boundary files from 1790 to the present; Terra provides data on population and the environment from 1960 to the present.
IPUMS Global Health: providing harmonized data from the Demographic and Health Surveys and the Performance Monitoring and Accountability surveys, for low and middle-income countries from the 1980s to the present.
IPUMS Time Use, providing time diary data from the U.S. and around the world from 1965 to the present.

Over 2,500 publications based on IPUMS data appeared in journals, magazines, and newspapers worldwide last year. From these publications and from nominated graduate student papers, the award committees selected the 2020 honorees.

New survey data from IPUMS PMA allows for exploration of factors in child nutrition status

December 21, 2021June 1, 2020 by mpcblog

By Devon Kristiansen

Last month, when IPUMS PMA released data from nine countries, including the most recent person level and service delivery point level surveys on family planning, we also released data on a new topic for Performance Monitoring for Action (PMA) – nutrition. PMA conducted two survey rounds each in Burkina Faso and Kenya (2017 and 2018) in both in people’s homes (households) and where they received care and medical services (service delivery points). Household surveys contained questions about the diet and nutritional status of children under 5 and women between 10 and 49 years, antenatal care and advice received by currently or recently pregnant women, and other household and demographic questions. Service delivery points were surveyed for medical equipment and services relating to malnutrition and anthropometric monitoring.

A key factor for nutrition status of young children in the low and middle-income country (LMIC) context is incidence of diarrhea. Diarrhea prevents the uptake of nutrients into the child’s body and causes dehydration. According to the World Health Organization¹, diarrhea is the leading cause of malnutrition and second leading cause of death for children under 5 globally. A well-established association in the nutrition literature is the presence of livestock on the homestead and incidence of diarrhea in young children, due to fecal contamination of water and food sources^{2, 3}.