Definition
PPAMHMO_ALL reports the duration, in months, of postpartum amenorrhea after the birth of the child, for women who gave birth in the last three to five years. Women whose period had not returned at the time of interview were excluded from PPAMHMO_ALL, but women who were still amenorrheic were included in calculations for the similar variable PPAMHMOC_ALL.
The maximum period allowed during the data editing (by the survey administrators) was the interval between the date of birth of the child and the date of conception of the following child (with birth date minus nine months used for the date of conception) or the date of interview if there was no following birth.
PPAMHMO_ALL consists of a set of six separate variables, covering the most recent birth (PPAMHMO_01) up to the sixth-most-recent birth (i.e., PPAMHMO_02, PPAMHMO_03, PPAMHMO_04, PPAMHMO_05, and PPAMHMO_06) during the reference period prior to the survey. If PPAMHMO_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 PPAMHMO_06 would not be available for that survey in IPUMS-DHS.
