Definition
For women who gave birth in the last three to five years, DELPRLONG_ALL (M30_x) indicates whether they experienced prolonged labor, such as regular contractions lasting more than 12 hours.
DELPRLONG_ALL consists of a set of six separate variables, covering the most recent birth (DELPRLONG_01) up to the sixth-most-recent birth (i.e., DELPRLONG_02, DELPRLONG_03, DELPRLONG_04, DELPRLONG_05, and DELPRLONG_06) during the reference period prior to the survey. If DELPRLONG_ALL is included in a data extract, all these separate variables are included in a researcher's data file.
For surveys including this question, information for this variable was collected on all births, up to a maximum of six, in the reference period. In many cases, data were hypothetically collected on up to six births, but no women in the survey had so many births (e.g., no woman had 4 or more births in 3 years, or had 5 or 6 births in 5 years). If, for example, no woman in a survey had 6 births in five years and only blank values were included in the original DHS file, then DELPRLONG_06 would not be available for that survey in IPUMS-DHS.
Some surveys, specified in the Comparability section, collected this information for the last-born child only.
