Statistical Modelling of Complex Correlated and Clustered Data Household Surveys in Africa

The main focus of this book is to present and showcase advanced modelling of routine or secondary survey data. Studies demonstrate that statistical literacy and knowledge are needed to understand health research outputs. The advent of user-friendly statistical packages combined with computing power and widespread availability of public health data resulted in more reported epidemiological studies in literature. However, analysis of secondary data, has some unique challenges. These are most widely reported health literature, so far has failed to recognize resulting in inappropriate analysis, and erroneous conclusions. This book presents the application of advanced statistical techniques to real examples emanating from routine or secondary survey data. These are essentially datasets in which the two editors have been involved, demonstrating how to tackle these challenges. Some of these challenges the complex sampling design of the surveys, the hierarchical nature of the data, the dependence of data at the sampled cluster and missing data among many more challenges. Using data from the Health Management Information System (HMIS), and Demographic and Health Survey (DHS), we provide various approaches and techniques of dealing with data complexity, how to handle correlated or clustered data. Each chapter presents an example code, which can be used to analyze similar data in R, Stata or SPSS. The book can be a resource to public health professionals interested in quantitative approaches to answer questions of epidemiological nature. Each chapter starts with a motivating background, review of statistical methods, analysis and results, ending discussion and possible recommendations.