Overview

The Demographic and Health Surveys program is an excellent resource which provides real data sets from around the world. These can be accessed online at https://dhsprogram.com/data/ and imported in to R-Instat for tidying and analysis. 

This activity guides users through the process of setting up and account with DHS, downloading and importing data sets into R-Instat. Then viewing the resulting data frame and metadata. 

Working on datasets like these provides the opportunity to do real research into issue of interest and builds skills how statistics can be applied in our data rich world. 

Start by watching the video (3 minutes). 


Video script prepared by Rachel Kirk-Gushowaty, and Roger Stern.  Video constructed and voiced by Beryl Waswa.

  • 0:00 Introduction 
  • 0:21 Selecting and Downloading data from the DHS Website 
  • 2:18 Importing the DHS data into R-Instat 
  • 2:59 Metadata
Then use this written exercise to follow the steps yourself. 
DHS Data in R-Instat