Reporting 30 Years of Survey Data

This report is the latest in a series of Population Reports issues covering survey findings on fertility, family planning, and health topics in developing countries. This report focused on data from 71 countries and 120 DHS or RHS surveys.

These surveys, which collect information from women (and sometimes from men) on fertility, contraceptive use, fertility desires, and other key reproductive health topics, provide the best available evidence on levels and trends in these indicators in the developing world and in some countries of the former Soviet bloc. Some 40 countries (38 in developing regions) were surveyed more than once since 1990, allowing examination of trends. Data from the YARHS are included here when appropriate.

In this issue of Population Reports, 60 developing countries are covered, representing nearly 50% of the population of the developing world. Excluding China, these surveys represent about 71% of the developing world. (Although Puerto Rico is a commonwealth freely associated with the United States, it is included in the report because it is part of the RHS survey program. It is reported in the Latin America and Caribbean region because of its geographic location.) The report treats separately the 11 surveyed countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia that were part of the Soviet bloc.

About the Data

The data presented here come principally from special tabulations that the DHS and RHS programs produced for this report and from on-line DHS STATcompiler tabulations. Some data differ slightly from the data in published Final Country Reports. Differences are mainly due to additional cleaning of the data sets since publication of the final reports. In some cases final report data have been used. (STATcompiler data and many final country reports are available at http://www.measuredhs.com/).

Not all surveys include questions on all of the topics discussed in this report, nor are the respondents defined the same way in all surveys. As a result, the number of countries reported in different sections and tables sometimes varies.

Surveys are conducted in different years in different countries; the year each survey was conducted is shown in the tables. The comparisons in this report generally use the most recent survey data from each country. Unavoidably, for a few countries the most recent data are as much as 12 years old. The surveys included in this report are listed on p. 40.

DHS and RHS surveys do not cover all developing countries. Therefore, some tables and discussions at the beginning of this report include estimates of fertility levels and contraceptive prevalence for other countries calculated and published by the United Nations (http://www.un.org/esa/population/unpop.htm) and the United States Bureau of the Census (http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idbnew.html).

A forthcoming issue of Population Reports will contain information about men’s family planning attitudes and behavior and about HIV/AIDS-related knowledge and behavior among both men and women.

Earlier survey findings can be found in previous issues of Population Reports. Survey findings from the 1980s appear in The Reproductive Revolution: New Survey Findings, Series M, No. 11, December 1992. Findings from the 1970s can be found in Fertility and Family Planning Surveys: An Update, Series M, No. 8, September–October 1985, Contraceptive Prevalence Surveys: A New Source of Family Planning Data, Series M, No. 5, May–June 1981, and The World Fertility Survey: Current Status and Findings, Series M, No. 3, July 1979. All five issues are available on CD-ROM (to order, see Additional Survey Data Online).