Integrated Global Health on Child Health and Development

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Project Summary/Abstract This project will develop a powerful integrated database for studying global transformations of maternal and child health. Building on the IPUMS model, the project will harmonize Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) across countries of the Global South and Eastern Europe, creating consistent microdata and documentation. MICS include data representing over half the world's children and women, with survey data from over 90 countries dating back to the late 1990s. Collected via partnerships between the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and participating countries, MICS were the first large-scale comparative surveys to focus on many topics of critical importance to children, such as child labor and experiences with violent discipline. While other global health surveys largely ignore the crucial years between age five and 14, older children and adolescents are a core sample component in MICS. In addition, MICS are the only global surveys that routinely gather extensive health information on orphans, who constitute upwards of 17% of young children in some sub-Saharan African countries. The surveys also extend beyond children to consider the fertility preferences, health behaviors, knowledge, and well-being of adults age 15-49. Nearly always representative at the national and regional levels, MICS are also exceptional for constructing representative samples of marginalized communities within countries, such as refugees, individuals in areas affected by conflict, and minority groups. Despite the immense value of MICS, there are currently major barriers to using the MICS microdata. Variable names, response codes, value labels, and universes are inconsistent across countries and over time within the same country. Information is divided unpredictably among multiple files (e.g., women, household members, children). Documentation on such key issues as question wording, file-linking directions, weighting issues, and sampling is unstandardized and dispersed. For one-quarter of MICS surveys, documentation, as well as variable and value labels, is available in French, Portuguese, or Spanish only. The project will freely disseminate the harmonized microdata through a user-friendly Internet access tool, allowing researchers to design comparative studies in an information-rich environment. This integrated MICS (IPUMS MICS) will dramatically reduce the effort required to conduct and replicate sophisticated cross-national and cross-temporal analyses with the microdata. By eliminating duplicated effort, it will promote the cost-effective use of scarce resources for demographic and health research. It will reduce errors introduced when researchers combine datasets without fully understanding incompatibilities. Most importantly, IPUMS MICS will stimulate new investigations on topics directly related to the mission of NICHD, helping us understand the profound changes in maternal and child health and well-being that are reshaping the world.