Definition
For women who gave birth in the last three to five years, BRSFEDMO_ALL (M5_x) reports the calculated months of breastfeeding for a birth, including cases where 1) the woman was still breastfeeding at the time of the interview or 2) the child had been breastfed until its death. Cases in these two categories were excluded from the related variable BRSFEDUR_ALL on the duration of breastfeeding.
For DHS Phase II forward, inconsistent durations based on the original report of the duration of breastfeeding were coded as "Inconsistent." In cases where the reported duration was one month longer than the relevant interval, duration was shortened by one month. If the duration of breastfeeding exceeded the child's age at death, the duration of breastfeeding was changed to the age at death.
BRSFEDMO_ALL consists of a set of up to six separate variables, covering the most recent birth (BRSFEDMO_01) up to, potentially, the sixth-most-recent birth (i.e., BRSFEDMO_02, BRSFEDMO_03, BRSFEDMO_04, BRSFEDMO_05, and BRSFEDMO_06) during the reference period prior to the survey. If BRSFEDMO_ALL is included in a data extract, all these separate variables are included in a researcher's data file.
The information in BRSFEDMO_ALL was collected for all births within the reference period preceding the survey. 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 BRSFEDMO_06 would not be available for that survey in IPUMS-DHS.
