Definition
BIRTHCERTREG_ALL indicates whether the respondent's child's birth has been registered with the government or whether the child has a birth certificate.
The interviewer first asked whether the child had a birth certificate, and if the response was "No," the interviewer then asked whether the child's birth had been registered with the state.
BIRTHCERTREG_ALL consists of a set of up to six separate variables, covering the most recent birth (BIRTHCERTREG_01) up to the sixth-most-recent birth (i.e., BIRTHCERTREG_02, BIRTHCERTREG_03, BIRTHCERTREG_04, BIRTHCERTREG_05, and BIRTHCERTREG_06) during the reference period prior to the survey. If BIRTHCERTREG_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, 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 BIRTHCERTREG_06 would not be available for that survey in IPUMS-DHS.
