birth_weekday_date: Birth Weekday Date

In Mikuana/vitalstatistics: CDC Vital Statistics Analysis Tools

Description

A date type field which represents the specific month, year, and day of the week that the birth occurred.

Details

Prior to 1989, the actual day of month of the birth was provided with the dataset, but after that day of month was removed and only day of the week was provided. We calculate the date value by setting the day of month to the corresponding day of the week in the first full week of the month when the birth occured.

For example, if a birth occurred in January of 2014 on a Tuesday, we determine that the first full week of January starts on the 5th (i.e. Sunday, January 5th), and that the Tuesday of that week is 2014-01-07. Accordingly the birth_weekday_date value would be set to 2014-01-07.

This field is useful because it can be used as a date value directly, while still representing the correct year, month, and day of the week that the birth occurred. It is important to note that this field does not represent the actual date of birth; day of month was reported until 1988, but was omitted from records after that time for privacy reasons.

This field is entirely blank for births during the year of 1968, as no data were provided in that data set. However, you can still make use of the birth_month_date field to access year and month of birth.

Value

a Date column

Data Quality Tests

This column is tested for the following quality assumptions prior to packaging:

1. less than 0.1 percent data missing (after 1968, which had no data for day of week)

2. year and month dateparts match birth_month_date (when not NA)

3. exactly 7 days are represented in each month

4. at least one record exists for each month in every year

See Also

birth_month_date births

Other births-column: birth_in_hospital, birth_month_date, birth_state, birth_via_cesarean, child_sex, mother_age

Mikuana/vitalstatistics documentation built on May 7, 2019, 4:57 p.m.