Definition
BIDX_ALL reports the index number of the child in the mother's birth history, from 1 to n, where the nth birth is the mother's first birth, and 1 is the most recently born child. Up to 20 births could be reported by a woman. After saying "Now I would like to record the names of all your births, whether still alive or not, starting with the first one you had," the interviewer recorded each child's name in turn on successively numbered lines printed in the "Reproduction" section of the individual woman's questionnaire.
When women are the unit of analysis, all of their children's characteristics are reported using the index number of the birth history. For example, variables ending with "_01" always refer to the most recent birth. This means that BIDX_01 will always equal "1," BIDX_02 will always equal "2," and so on.
Combined with CASEID, BIDX_ALL uniquely identifies births within a sample. Combined with IDHSPID, BIDX_ALL uniquely identifies births across samples. Using these variables, data users can link IPUMS-DHS data to original DHS child-level (KR) and birth-level (BR) datasets.
BIDX_ALL consists of a set of twenty separate variables, covering the most recent birth (BIDX_01) up to the twentieth-most-recent birth (BIDX_20) for a female respondent of childbearing age. If BIDX_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 BIDX_20 would not be available for that survey in IPUMS-DHS.
