Bangladesh 1993-1994 Demographic and Health ... - Measure DHS

Figure C.1Births by Calendar Year, Bangladesh, 1983-1993Number of bi~hs2,0001 , 5 0 0 ~1,000500o t I I I I I I I I83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93YearNote: Year refers to April-March (see text) BDHS 1993-94One place in which the BDHS solicited objective data on dates is in the questions on dates ofchildhood immunizations. Mothers of all children born after April 1990 were asked to show the interviewersthe health cards for these children and interviewers copied the dates from the cards. Ira child's date of birthwere misreported as occurring earlier than it actually did, s/he would appear to have received vaccinationsat an older age. If displacement were common, one would expect to find unusually low proportions ofchildren who had received various vaccinations by age 12 months. However, the proportion of childrenreported in the B DHS to have received various vaccinations by age 12 months is only slightly lower than theproportion who received them by the time of the survey (see Table 8.6), lending little evidence to support thehypothesis of age overstatement.One indication that children's ages might have been overstated appears in the data on breastfeedingand supplementation. The data show that supplementation of breastfed children with solid and mushy foodsis generally delayed. For example, more than half of children age 10-11 months of age were not given anysolid or mushy food in the 24 hours prior to the survey (see Section 8.5). If some of these children were infact, several months younger than reported, the data would be more plausible. Overstatement would alsoaccount for the extraordinarily long reported durations of breastfeeding in Bangladesh.Some light may be shed on the question of age misreporting and/or omission of children in surveysby an on-going study comparing birth history data collected in a DHS-type survey with a continuous recordkeepingsurveillance system maintained by the International Centre for the Control of Diarrhoeal DiseaseResearch, Bangladesh. One objective of the study is to evaluate the DHS methodology, especially the useof a birth history to collect fertility and child mortality information. For this reason, the survey utilizedquestionnaires and procedures almost identical to those used in the BDHS and the interviewers had alsoworked on the BDHS. The survey covered 3,039 ever-married women living in Matlab in April, May 1994,170