It interacts with the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) Program API (https://api.dhsprogram.com), and provides tools to use the API to ease identifying, downloading, loading and analysing the raw survey data collected by the DHS.
Package: rdhs
Type: Package
Title: API Client and Dataset Management for the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) Data
Version: 0.5.0
Authors@R: c(
person("OJ", "Watson", role=c("aut", "cre"),
email="o.watson15@imperial.ac.uk"),
person("Jeff", "Eaton", role="aut"))
Maintainer: OJ Watson <o.watson15@imperial.ac.uk>
URL: https://ojwatson.github.io/rdhs/
BugReports: https://github.com/OJWatson/rdhs/issues
Description: Provides a client for (1) querying the DHS API for survey indicators
and metadata (https://api.dhsprogram.com/#/index.html), (2) identifying surveys
and datasets for analysis, (3) downloading survey datasets from the DHS website,
(4) loading datasets and associate metadata into R, and (5) extracting variables
and combining datasets for pooled analysis.
LazyData: TRUE
Depends: R (>= 3.3.0)
Imports:
R6,
httr,
jsonlite,
foreign,
magrittr,
rappdirs,
digest,
storr,
xml2,
qdapRegex,
rgdal,
getPass,
haven,
iotools
Suggests:
testthat,
knitr,
rmarkdown,
ggplot2,
survey,
data.table,
microbenchmark
License: MIT + file LICENSE
RoxygenNote: 6.0.1
VignetteBuilder: knitr
Language: en-GB
https://github.com/OJWatson/rdhs
Please indicate which category or categories from our package fit policies this package falls under *and why(? (e.g., data retrieval, reproducibility. If you are unsure, we suggest you make a pre-submission inquiry.):
Who is the target audience and what are scientific applications of this package?
Global Health Researchers and Policy makers. The DHS data has been used in well over 20,000 academic studies (based on google scholar search for "DHS" AND "demographic and health survey") that have helped shape progress towards targets such as the Sustainable Development Goals and inform health policy such as detailing trends in child mortality and characterising the distribution and use of insecticide-treated bed nets in Africa. The package will help assist researchers who use R for these purposes rather than/don't have access to stata/sas (these datasets are the published datasets by the DHS program), as well as serve to simplify commonly required analytical pipelines. The end result aims to increase the end user accessibility to the raw data and create a tool that supports reproducible global health research.
There are a number of other R pacakges that work with DHS data in various ways. A quick search of github for "DHS" and R shows 39 repos, however the majority are small custom scripts.
1 repo looks just at interacting with the DHS API, but it hasn't been added to for almost a year, and the API endpoint functions do not cover all the endpoints available nor allow you to query each endpoint by all the possible query terms. It also requires the user to know query terms rather than having them as arguments.
1 repo also looks at downloading the survey datasets from the website (and it was used initially when designing these fucntions with rdhs). However, it skips over large dataset files, has some bugs depending on the character length of your login credentials, and does not allow you to read in all the datasets available from the website. [ FYI: we don't read in .sas7bdat (we are writing a parser for the oddly formed catalog files provided by the DHS website for these) or hierarchal dataset files as we have a parser for the flat equivalent of hierarchal dataset. In theory each file format should be the same data, so having one parser that works is sufficient, but we have found that the flat and spss data formats have the most complete meta data for the data variable labels).
There are then a few repos that do bespoke pieces of analysis (2 of which are on CRAN) looking at spatial analysis and calculating survey statistics. We are hoping to bring these onboard, either by wrapping them to use the output of our downloaded harmonised datasets, or by writing additional tools for downstream analysis (see TODO.md).
Confirm each of the following by checking the box. This package:
paper.md matching JOSS's requirements with a high-level description in the package root or in inst/.R CMD check (or devtools::check()) succeed? Paste and describe any errors or warnings:Yes:
R CMD check results
0 errors | 0 warnings | 0 notes
Does the package conform to rOpenSci packaging guidelines? Please describe any exceptions:
If this is a resubmission following rejection, please explain the change in circumstances:
If possible, please provide recommendations of reviewers - those with experience with similar packages and/or likely users of your package - and their GitHub user names:
RetroSearch is an open source project built by @garambo | Open a GitHub Issue
Search and Browse the WWW like it's 1997 | Search results from DuckDuckGo
HTML:
3.2
| Encoding:
UTF-8
| Version:
0.7.4