In a PLOS Medicine Review, Attila Hancioglu and Fred Arnold describe the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) and highlight the methodological principles and challenges involved in using household survey data to measure reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health intervention coverage.

Measuring Coverage in Maternal and Child Health: New Findings, New Strategies and Recommendations for Action In this overview of the PLOS Medicine Collection on “Measuring Coverage in Maternal and Child Health, Jennifer Bryce and colleagues discuss how and why some of the indicators now being used to track intervention coverage may not provide fully reliable measurements, draw together strategies proposed across the Collection for improving these measurements and make recommendations for action.

This article provides an overview of the Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) as a data source. MICS—one of the largest household survey programs focused on children and women—has covered 116 countries, many over several rounds of surveys producing trend data. Data are collected on a range of indicators for children, adolescents, women, and in recent years, men. Topics include fertility, mortality, contraceptive use, unmet need, maternal and newborn health, female genital mutilation, menstrual hygiene management, child illness and treatment, and child development and nutrition, among others. The surveys are cross‐sectional and use multistage probability designs to develop representative samples of households at the national and subnational levels. Survey interviews are conducted with: a household respondent who provides data on the household status; women and men aged 15–49 who provide current status and retrospective data on themselves; and mothers (or caregivers) who provide data on children under age 18. Data can be compared across countries and time for the most part, provide a wealth of indicators across research fields, and are open access. Data can be accessed on the MICS website where users are granted access to the MICS datasets for research purposes.

No abstract

Demographic differentials, Demographic integration, Kurdish population, Turkey,