IPUMS Global Health – Use It for Good

Linking children and adolescents to their mothers using IPUMS MICS

March 20, 2026 by mpcblog

By Anna Bolgrien

IPUMS MICS offers hundreds of harmonized variables related to children’s health and wellbeing that allow for rich and innovative research. From the IPUMS MICS website, users can browse variables and create custom data extracts within a selected unit of analysis. In order to conduct many analyses, however, users will want to combine and link datasets relating to different units of analysis available in MICS.

For example, to investigate how child characteristics are related to characteristics of their mother, users will need to download and link data between the Children (either 0-4 or 5-17) unit of analysis and the Women unit of analysis.

IPUMS MICS provides instructions for linking across units of analysis as a user note. This user note lists the variables available as linking keys for each unit of analysis, and is a general guide for linking across the units, such as linking household characteristics with individual person records.

In this blog post, we provide more detailed information on how to link children and adolescents to their mothers. Similar logic can be applied to link children to fathers or other caregivers in the household. As IPUMS MICS requires Stata to conduct harmonization, we provide example code in Stata syntax.

Tools for Combining Data Across IPUMS Global Health Surveys

May 14, 2025March 3, 2025 by mpcblog

By Miriam King, Devon Kristiansen, and Anna Bolgrien

IPUMS Global Health includes integrated data from three international health surveys: Demographic and Health Surveys (IPUMS DHS), Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (IPUMS MICS), and Performance Monitoring for Action (IPUMS PMA). All three surveys are nationally representative, primarily focus on low- and middle-income countries, and address issues related to the health and well-being of women and young children. These commonalities make combining integrated data across these data collections appealing. As Figure 1 shows, IPUMS DHS and IPUMS MICS cover different countries; combining them extends the geographic coverage of harmonized versions of data covering similar topics. Researchers can also combine data for those countries included in both IPUMS DHS and IPUMS MICS to provide additional observation points for time-series analyses.

Figure 1: Countries covered by IPUMS DHS and IPUMS MICS

World map with the countries included in IPUMS MICS and IPUMS DHS shaded in

Researchers who want to carry out cross-survey analyses face practical challenges. IPUMS imposes consistent variable names and codes within one kind of survey (DHS, MICS, or PMA); harmonized variable names and codes differ between these surveys. On each project’s website, the documentation for each variable highlights comparability issues to keep in mind when combining multiple samples, either within one type of survey or across survey types. IPUMS users must make separate customized data files from each database and merge those files. And subtle differences in question wording, skip patterns, geographic boundaries, and sampling procedures—such as MICS’ taking reports on child health from caretakers other than the biological mother—can introduce inconsistencies and inadvertent errors.

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

June 4, 2025September 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

June 13, 2025March 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

June 13, 2025March 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 retrospective 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

March 17, 2026June 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!