Weiteres Paper

Methods protocol for the Human Fertility Collection

Abstract

The Human Fertility Collection (HFC) is part of the Human Fertility Data Project, which is a joint project of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) and the Vienna Institute of Demography (VID). The HFC has been designed to supplement the HFD and to provide the international research community with free, user-friendly access to a wide range of fertility data that, for various reasons, cannot be included in the HFD. The HFC is capable of integrating a broad variety of fertility data pertaining to national and regional populations, as well as to various sub-populations. The quality requirements for the data selected for the HFC are less strict than those for the HFD, which allows for the expansion of the geographic coverage of HFC data to less developed parts of the world.

The HFC provides fertility data assembled from different (and not necessarily official) sources, such as statistical and scientific publications, online databases of national statistical offices, and data collections compiled by individual researchers and research organizations. All of the output HFC data are organized in a uniform format, with full references to their sources. The raw data are also made accessible to HFC users in the form of  downloadable original data files, copies of publications, or the internet pages from which the data originate in PDF format.

This document describes general principles that are used in constructing and presenting the database and outlines data processing, including the common adjustments to input data and the computations of aggregated fertility indicators.