Definition
BINT4YR_ALL (B14_x) indicates whether the preceding birth interval, or the length of time in months the child was born after the mother's previous birth (i.e., after the child's next oldest sibling), was four or more years. The survey form included the question, "Were there any other live births between (NAME OF PREVIOUS BIRTH) and (NAME), including any children who died?" and left room to record the month and year of each birth.
Because BINT4YR_ALL relates to time since the birth of the child's older sibling, first-born children are not included in this variable set.
The DHS Recode Manual for Phase III describes how the calculation of the birth interval reported in this variable was done:
This calculation is performed by the interviewer, purely in terms of years, ignoring the month of birth of each of the children. For example, a birth in April 1988 would be categorized as being four or more years after a birth in October 1984, even though there is actually less than four years between the births.
The DHS Recode Manuals for Phases III and IV add the following note explaining the rationale for BINT4YR (B14):
Variables B14 and B15 are questions used in the interview to try and ascertain if the respondent had omitted any live births while reporting her birth history. The birth history may have been modified during the interviewing process, and the responses may not now correspond to the interval between the birth and the preceding birth recorded in this section. The data have been included to help indicate cases where the respondent may have omitted live births while originally reporting the birth history. The omitted births should be included in this final version of the birth history.
The related variables BIRTHINTPREMO_ALL (B11_x) and BIRTHINTPOSTMO_ALL (B12_x) report the finalized numbers, in months, for the length of the birth intervals preceding and following a birth, respectively.
BINT4YR_ALL consists of a set of twenty separate variables, covering the most recent birth (BINT4YR_01) up to the twentieth-most-recent birth (BINT4YR_20) for a female respondent of childbearing age. If BINT4YR_ALL is included in a data extract, all these separate variables are included in a researcher's data file.
Information for this variable was collected on all births for a woman, up to a maximum of twenty. In many cases, data were hypothetically collected on up to twenty births, but no women in the survey had so many births (e.g., no woman had 19 or 20 births). If, for example, no woman in a survey had 20 births and only blank values were included in the original DHS file, then BINT4YR_20 would not be available for that survey in IPUMS-DHS.
