Author: OJ Watson
“The Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) Program has collected and disseminated population survey data from over 90 countries for over 30 years. …DHS survey data has been used to inform health policy such as detailing trends in child mortality and characterising the distribution of malaria control interventions in Africa in order to map the burden of malaria… Although standard health indicators are routinely published in the survey final reports that are published by the DHS program, much of the value of the DHS data is derived from the ability to download and analyse the raw datasets for subgroup analysis, pooled multi-country analysis, and extended research studies…This where I got involved, in trying to create a tool that helped enable researchers to quickly gain access to the raw data sets.”
In this post, beyond giving an overview and example of what the rdhs package can do, OJ Watson describes how he became involved in the project, his impressions from writing his first proper package and the rOpenSci review process, and a couple of things he learned along the way.
Read the full post here: https://ropensci.org/blog/2019/01/29/rdhs/