ArticleDemography2019
Misreporting Month of Birth: Diagnosis and Implications for Research on Nutrition and Early Childhood in Developing Countries.
Article in Demography, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Improving retrospective data on recent household deaths: a multi-arm randomized trial in Guinea-Bissau.International journal of epidemiology · 2025Trial
- Article
- Subnational variations in the quality of household survey data in sub-Saharan Africa.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Influence of non-directional errors in anthropometric measurements and age estimation on anthropometric prevalence indicators.PloS one · 2024Article
- Article
- Quality of child anthropometric data from SISVAN, Brazil, 2008-2017.Revista de saude publica · 2023Article
- Mothers' Social Status and Children's Health: Evidence From Joint Households in Rural India.Demography · 2022Article
- Using administrative records to support the linkage of census data: protocol for building a longitudinal infrastructure of U.S. census records.International journal of population data science · 2022Article
- Understanding drivers of stunting reduction in Nigeria from 2003 to 2018: a regression analysis.Food security · 2022Article
- Migration and interbirth transition rate using Benin Demographic and Health Survey data: Does episode-splitting matter?PloS one · 2021Article
- Characterizing the contribution of high temperatures to child undernourishment in Sub-Saharan Africa.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Anthropometric data quality assessment in multisurvey studies of child growth.The American journal of clinical nutrition · 2020Article
- Stunted from the start: Early life weather conditions and child undernutrition in Ethiopia.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2020Article
- Investigating the linkages between pregnancy outcomes and climate in sub-Saharan Africa.Population and environment · 2020Article
- Sensitivity of Nutrition Indicators to Measure the Impact of a Multi-Sectoral Intervention: Cross-Sectional, Household, and Individual Level Analysis.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2020Article
- Correcting for artifactual correlation between misreported month of birth and attained height-for-age reduces but does not eliminate measured vulnerability to season of birth in poorer countries.The American journal of clinical nutrition · 2019Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
A large literature has used children's birthdays to identify exposure to shocks and estimate their impacts on later outcomes. Using height-for-age z scores (HAZ) for more than 990,000 children in 62 countries from 163 Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), we show how random errors in birth dates create artifacts in HAZ that can be used to diagnose the extent of age misreporting. The most important artifact is an upward gradient in HAZ by recorded month of birth (MOB) from start to end of calendar years, resulting in a large HAZ differential between December- and January-born children of -0.32 HAZ points. We observe a second artifact associated with round ages, with a downward gradient in HAZ by recorded age in months, and then an upward step after reaching ages 2, 3, and 4. These artifacts have previously been interpreted as actual health shocks. We show that they are not related to agroclimatic conditions but are instead linked to the type of calendar used and arise mainly when enumerators do not see the child's birth registration cards. We explain the size of the December-January gap through simulation in which 11 % of children have their birth date replaced by a random month. We find a minor impact on the average stunting rate but a larger impact in specific error-prone surveys. We further show how misreporting MOB causes attenuation bias when MOB is used for identification of shock exposure as well as systematic bias in the impact on HAZ of events that occur early or late in each calendar year.
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