Definition
AWFACTT is a 5-digit variable (in IPUMS-DHS) with 2 implied decimal places that is used to create total population estimates for all women of childbearing age, for those samples interviewing only ever-married women. A post from DHS senior staff member Tom Pullum on the DHS Users Forum explains,
The all-woman factors are needed when you are trying to estimate something for all women, but you have to work with ever-married women because that's all you have in the sample. An example is when you want to estimate a fertility rate for all women but you only have the births and exposure for ever-married women. You have to assume that (a) never-married women have no births and (b) awfact/100 is a multiplier to inflate exposure for ever-married women to exposure for all women.
For surveys that used a sampling frame of all women of childbearing age, AWFACTT has a value of 100 (or 1.00, with two decimal places), and thus has no effect on the survey statistics when used as a multiplier. For samples that included only ever-married women, AWFACTT serves as a multiplier to create total population figures for all women of childbearing age, following the assumptions noted above.
The width of AWFACTT ranges from a low of 3 to a high of 5 in the original DHS files; see Comparability for further discussion.
