Definition
LITBRIG serves as a bridging variable between two approaches to collecting information on literacy. Initially, respondents were asked, "Can you read a letter or newspaper easily, with difficulty, or not at all?" In many countries, persons with secondary or higher levels of schooling were presumed to "read easily," but coding criteria varied across countries.
Beginning with Phase 4 of the DHS, persons with less than secondary school education were asked to demonstrate their literacy level by reading aloud a sentence on a card and were classified as "cannot read at all," "able to read only parts of sentence," and "able to read whole sentence." As before, those with secondary or higher schooling were presumed to have attained the highest literacy level.
LITBRIG combines information from the first approach of asking about literacy (in LIT1 [V108]) and the second approach of testing literacy based on reading a sentence aloud (in LIT2 [V155]).
See Comparability for more information.