Dear IDHS experts, peace and health for you.
I am studying my PHD based on the Ethiopian DHS data and I downloaded the EDHS 2000-2016 from the IPUMS database. However, the IPUMS doesn’t contain the mini-EDHS 2019. Since I am interested in studying trends in fertility and mortality, I want to have all surveys. So, how can I add the mini-EDHS 2019 to the pooled IPUMS data? What appending or merging techniques can I use? One response (in 2018) given to a similar post in The DHS Program User Forum: IPUMS Demographic and Health Surveys (IPUMS-DHS) » Merging DHS with IPUMS-DHS to get harmonized districts says as it is not possible to do that but, I believe experts may propose some solutions to this.
We’ve already communicated about this by email, but I wanted to share the info here in case others have similar questions. I will also note that the 2019 Ethiopia mini-DHS sample is now available through IPUMS DHS.
Since different respondents are sampled each year, there is no way to link these samples based on caseid. Since the IPUMS and the original DHS datasets have different variable names, you will either need to rename all the variables in the original DHS dataset to match the IPUMS dataset, and then append the 2019 records to your IPUMS extract, or analyze the 2019 data separately. If you are appending these to your IPUMS extract, please make sure that the variable definitions and codes are consistent between the 2019 and earlier samples. You can see the original DHS variable name by navigating to that variable’s description page on IPUMS. The original variable name is included in parentheses next to the IPUMS variable name. For example, the original name of FERTPREF is V602.
Excellent thank you