Jt. Boerma et al., DATA ON BIRTH-WEIGHT IN DEVELOPING-COUNTRIES - CAN SURVEYS HELP, Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 74(2), 1996, pp. 209-216
The main source of data on birth weight in developing countries is sta
tistics from health facilities, although most developing countries do
not produce annual estimates of the incidence of low birth weight from
these data. Such estimates would be subject to selection bias as the
data are usually limited to babies born within health facilities, and
therefore are representative of a subgroup that is markedly different
from the overall population of neonates. Since 1990 the Demographic an
d Health Surveys programme has included questions on recalled birth we
ight and relative size at birth in 15 national surveys. In this articl
e, we show that these cross-sectional surveys can provide a useful dat
a source for making national estimates of mean birth weight and the in
cidence of low birth weight. The extent of misclassification of birth
weight is, however, too large to use the data on relative size at birt
h as an indicator of low birth weight at the individual level.