Calculating Fertility and Childhood Mortality Rates From Survey Data Using the DHS.Rates R Package

Mahmoud Elkasabi , The DHS Program

The Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) are a major source for many demographic and health indicators in developing countries. Although these indicators are well-defined in the literature, using survey data to calculate some of these indicators has never been an easy task for data users. This paper presents the DHS.rates, a user-friendly R package developed to calculate fertility and childhood mortality indicators, such as Total Fertility Rate, General Fertility Rate and the Age-Specific Fertility Rates, Neonatal Mortality Rate, Post-Neonatal Mortality Indicator, Infant Mortality Indicator, Child Mortality Indicator and Under-5 Mortality Indicator, from the DHS survey data. The package allows for national and subnational indicators. In addition, the package calculates precision indicators such as standard error, design effect and confidence interval for each demographic indicator. Moreover, the package can be used to calculate the same indicators from other surveys such as the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS).

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 Presented in Session 146. Flash Session: Data Visualizations, Open Source, and Other Tools of Applied Demography