Demographic and Health Surveys Data

: In this lesson, we will access and investigate DHS survey data for Malawi.

Instructions

Note: these instructions are for current course students only, whose email addresses have been shared with the DHS Survey program. The instructions will be removed once all the current students have gained access.

1. Go to https://dhsprogram.com/Data/
2. Create an account with your college e-mail address
3. Within the Datasets menu, Create a new project
4. Enter the following information: Project Title: Reproducing a Vulnerability Model of Malawi Co-researchers Name: Joseph Holler Co-researchers Email Address: josephh@middlebury.edu Description of Study: The purpose of this study with Professor Joseph Holler is to reproduce the methods of a published research article: Malcomb, D. W., E. A. Weaver, and A. R. Krakowka. 2014. Vulnerability modeling for sub-Saharan Africa: An operationalized approach in Malawi. Applied Geography 48:17–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2014.01.004. The authors of this paper used geocoded DHS surveys for Malawi in 2004 and 2010, in combination with FEWSnet livelihood data and UNEP flood and drought risk data. Following the author’s methodology, we plan to download the data using the rdhs package for R and aggregate the data at Malawi’s 2nd administrative level: districts. We will be working with a GitHub repository that stores the raw data locally in a directory ignored by the .gitignore file, and only moves the data into a shared and version-controlled directory once it has been aggregated to the District level. This will ensure that the privacy of survey respondents and requirements of data partners are protected, because all of the data will be aggregated into district polygons, as already shown and published in Malcomb et al (2014). The raw individual-level data will be deleted once the analysis is complete by May 31, 2021.
5. Choose Region: Sub-Saharan Africa
6. Click Show GPS Datasets at the top-left of the country tables
7. Check Survey and GPS data for Malawi
8. Save selection
9. Read and agree to the conditions of use for the DHS Program datasets and save these conditions for your metadata records.
10. Enter a Justification for using DHS Program Geographic Datasets: The research aim is to reproduce Malcomb et al (2014) in which GPS Datasets are used to spatially join DHS Survey data to Malawi’s Districts for the purpose of sub-national climate change vulnerability mapping. Therefore, the research will not be reproducible without the geographic datasets.

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