UCL Open: Environment Editorial Office
2020-07-30
Average rating: | Rated 4 of 5. |
Level of importance: | Rated 4 of 5. |
Level of validity: | Rated 3 of 5. |
Level of completeness: | Rated 4 of 5. |
Level of comprehensibility: | Rated 4 of 5. |
Competing interests: | The Reviewer is a Theme Editor for the journal |
This work has been published open access under Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Conditions, terms of use and publishing policy can be found at www.scienceopen.com.
Keywords: | water, sanitation, environment, stunting, agriculture, fuel, Sanitation, health, and the environment, People and their environment, malnutrition, rural, growth, India |
This statistical analysis of DHS data should be using survey statistics (survey logistic regression), not asymptotic-theory “normal” logistic regression. Specifically, the authors should do a subpopulation analysis of the Rajasthan State data to correct the weights for exclusion of some of the survey sample. This is not a self-weighted random sample, it is a multistate cluster sample (from which a single state is being included in this analysis). Failure to use appropriate survey weights / survey estimation techniques (even before getting into subpopulation estimation issues) can sometimes lead to completely different conclusions from the “same” dataset. See for example: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19713856/
The authors used SPSS to do their analysis; an overview of how to do survey estimation (the right way for these logistic regressions to be done) in SPSS is available here: https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3253&context=jmasm
Also in Methods 2.1, they have a “c” bullet point listed but the text is empty.
on behalf of Dr Matthew Gribble
Theme Editor, UCL Open Environment