According to the national Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), between 10% and 90% of women in poorer countries agree that domestic violence against women is justified. Such wide variation in women’s responses raises concerns about the comparability of the underlying attitudinal question, and the validity of comparative research that assumes comparability. Using 67 DHS conducted in 48 countrie...

Premarital fertility, defined as birth before first marriage, is investigated in Madagascar, using two Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) conducted in 1992 and 1997. About 8 per cent of all births and 23 per cent of first births take place before marriage, despite a low underlying mean age at first marriage, estimated to be 18.6 years in the absence of a previous birth. A premarital first bir...

Despite a growing literature documenting strong linkages between income and health, there remains little understanding of how economic factors shape disease outcomes in the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Using individual level data from nineteen sub-Saharan African countries, we show that negative income shocks can lead to substantial increases in HIV prevalence. We match data on individuals’ HIV status fr...

The underlying motivation of this study is to account for the spatial variation of factors affecting women’s access to land, which has been largely ignored by the traditional regressionbased model studies, much to the detriment of spatially varying relationships. Using household and individual-level data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), this study used Geographically Weighted Regr...

Previous studies, conducted mainly in Asian countries, have shown that women‘s empowerment is associated with contraceptive use, lower fertility, and longer birth intervals. Yet little is known about the association of women‘s empowerment with fertility desires in subSaharan African countries where overall fertility levels remain high. This study tries to fill this gap, exploring whether women‘...

OBJECTIVE The aim of the study was to assess construct and discriminant validity of four health-related work productivity loss questionnaires in relation to employer productivity metrics, and to describe variation in economic estimates of productivity loss provided by the questionnaires in healthy workers. METHODS Fifty-eight billing office workers completed surveys including health informati...

BACKGROUND Previous research has indicated neck-shoulder disorders to have a fluctuating course incorporating a variety of symptoms. These findings awoke our interest to make a comparison between symptoms experienced by people affected with the disorder and the content of questionnaires that assess pain and other symptoms in neck-shoulder disorders. Thus the aims of this study were: -to explore...

STUDY OBJECTIVES To develop a short form of an interview schedule used successfully in previous national surveys of care for the dying, and to investigate the effect of administering it by post on response rate, response bias and on the nature of responses to questions. DESIGN Randomised controlled trial. SETTING An inner London health authority. PARTICIPANTS Informants (person registerin...

This paper reassesses the nexus between female education, employment and fertility in Nigeria. The four Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) that have been conducted in the country (1990–2008) were analysed. Between 1990 and 2008, the educational status of women improved appreciably and the proportion of illiterate women in the country declined from 57.2 to 35.8 per cent. Multivariate analysis ...

BACKGROUND The aim of this paper was to examine associations between school building characteristics, indoor environmental quality (IEQ), and health responses using questionnaire data from both school principals and students. METHODS From 334 randomly sampled schools, 4248 sixth grade students from 297 schools participated in a questionnaire. From these schools, 134 principals returned questi...