title: Monitoring Change in Child Mortality through Household Surveys.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Most low- and middle-income countries lack fully functional civil registration systems. Measures of under-five mortality are typically derived from periodic household surveys collecting detailed information from women on births and child deaths. However, such surveys are expensive and are not appropriate for monitoring short-term changes in child mortality. We explored and tested the validity of two new analysis methods for less-expensive summary histories of births and child deaths for such monitoring in five African countries.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The first method we explored uses individual-level survey data on births and child deaths to impute full birth histories from an earlier survey onto summary histories from a more recent survey. The second method uses cohort changes between two surveys in the average number of children born and the number of children dead by single year of age to estimate under-five mortality for the inter-survey period. The first method produces acceptable annual estimates of under-five mortality for two out of six applications to available data sets; the second method produced an acceptable estimate in only one of five applications, though none of the applications used ideal data sets.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The methods we tested were not able to produce consistently good quality estimates of annual under-five mortality from summary birth history data. The key problem we identified was not with the methods themselves, but with the underlying quality of the summary birth histories. If summary birth histories are to be included in general household surveys, considerable emphasis must be placed on quality control.
authors.affiliation: Institute for International Programs, Department of International Health, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, United States of America.|Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA, United States of America.
authors.forename: Kenneth
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Hill
authors.affiliation: Institute for International Programs, Department of International Health, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, United States of America.
authors.forename: Eoghan
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Brady
authors.affiliation: Institute for International Programs, Department of International Health, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, United States of America.
authors.forename: Linnea
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Zimmerman
authors.affiliation: Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA, United States of America.
authors.forename: Livia
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Montana
authors.affiliation: Institute for International Programs, Department of International Health, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, United States of America.
authors.forename: Romesh
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Silva
authors.affiliation: UNICEF, New York, NY, United States of America.
authors.forename: Agbessi
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Amouzou
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D046688:Child Mortality; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003906:Developing Countries; D005002:Ethiopia / Q000453:epidemiology; D005260:Female; D005869:Ghana / Q000453:epidemiology; D006306:Health Surveys; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007226:Infant Mortality; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D008295:Malawi / Q000453:epidemiology; D008297:Male; D008302:Mali / Q000453:epidemiology; D008875:Middle Aged; D009548:Niger / Q000453:epidemiology; D055815:Young Adult