#  World Health Surveys: Arriving Soon 

 





March 21, 2006

 

 

**Sebastian Bauhoff**

Good data on health-related issues in developing countries is hard to find, especially if you need large samples and cross-country comparability. The latest round of the [World Health Surveys (WHS)](http://www.who.int/healthinfo/survey/en/index.html) is starting to become available to researchers in the next months and might be one of the best surveys out there, in addition to the  
[Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS)](http://www.measuredhs.com/).

The current WHS has been conducted in 70 countries in 2000-2001. The survey is standardized and comes with several modules, including measures of health states of populations; risk factors; responsiveness of health systems; coverage, access and utilization of key health services; and health care expenditures. The instruments use several innovative features, including [anchoring vignettes](http://www.iq.harvard.edu/blog/sss/archives/2005/12/anchoring_vigne.shtml) and geocoding, and seems to collect more information on income/expenditure than DHS does.

From the looks, WHS could easily become the new standard dataset for cross-country comparisons of health indicators, though for some applications it might be more of a complement than substitute for the DHS. As of now, the questionnaires and some country reports are online, and the micro-data is supposed to be available by the middle of the year at the latest.

Posted by [Sebastian Bauhoff](http://www.iq.harvard.edu/blog/sss/archives/author/sebastian-bauhoff/) at March 21, 2006 6:00 AM



 

 

 



 

 

 Share on:- [     Facebook ](#)
- [     Twitter ](#)
- [     Linkedin ](#)