Definition
For women who gave birth in the three to five years preceding the survey and who ever breastfed the infant, BRSFEDST_ALL (M34_x) reports the length of time between the birth and when the woman first breastfed her child. Following DHS convention, intervals reported in hours are coded with a "1" in the first digit, and intervals reported in days are coded with a "2" in the first digit.
BRSFEDST_ALL consists of a set of six separate variables, covering the most recent birth (BRSFEDST_01) up to the sixth-most-recent birth (i.e., BRSFEDST_02, BRSFEDST_03, BRSFEDST_04, BRSFEDST_05, and BRSFEDST_06) during the reference period prior to the survey. If BRSFEDST_ALL is included in a data extract, all these separate variables are included in a researcher's data file.
For surveys including this question, information for this variable was collected on all births, up to a maximum of six, in the reference period. 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 BRSFEDST_06 would not be available for that survey in IPUMS-DHS.
Many surveys, noted in the Comparability section, collected this information for the last-born child only.
