Definition
For women who gave birth in the last three to five years, BIRTHWTREF_ALL (M19A_x) indicates whether the child's reported weight at birth (BIRTHWT_ALL) was recorded from a health card or based on the mother's recall. Children who were not weighed are coded 9996.
BIRTHWTREF_ALL consists of a set of up to six separate variables, covering the most recent birth (BIRTHWTREF_01) up to, potentially, the sixth-most-recent birth (i.e., BIRTHWTREF_02, BIRTHWTREF_03, BIRTHWTREF_04, BIRTHWTREF_05, and BIRTHWTREF_06) during the reference period prior to the survey. If BIRTHWTREF_ALL is included in a data extract, all these separate variables are included in a researcher's data file.
This information was collected for all births within the reference period preceding the survey. In many cases, data were hypothetically collected on up to six births, but no women in the survey had so many births (e.g., no woman had 4 or more births in 3 years, or had 5 or 6 births in 5 years). If, for example, no woman in a survey had 6 births in five years and only blank values were included in the original DHS file, then BIRTHWTREF_06 would not be available for that survey in IPUMS-DHS.
