Challenges and Solutions to Combining Data in IPUMS Global Health

IPUMS Global Health provides free integrated variables and documentation for three leading global health surveys: Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), UNICEF Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS), and Performance Monitoring for Action (PMA), with nationally representative surveys in over 100 countries. MICS, DHS, and PMA surveys cover many of the same topics and employ similar questions and sampling approaches. Pooling data across these IPUMS collections could extend analyses’ geographic and temporal scope, but differences between the surveys make such pooling labor-intensive and error-prone. In this webinar, we identify the main challenges to combining data across IPUMS Global Health data collections, and we describe ongoing work by IPUMS to increase the three surveys’ interoperability.