[Babase] Re: PREGS conversion error - no conceive date
Catherine Markham
amarkham at princeton.edu
Fri Mar 24 13:47:06 EST 2006
Hi everyone,
Jeanne just finished looking at the error described below. In all cases
EXCEPT for the 2 aborts, it was decided to use birth - 178 (average
gestation length) for calculating estimated conception dates. Jeanne
checked out the field notes for the fetal loss cases and determined
probable conception dates for those two pregnancies using whatever notes
were available. ALL (fetal losses and live births) of the ddates should
be marked as "estimated."
I'll send details of the particular conception dates as an email
attachment in a separate message to Karl. I won't enter anything into
the Foxpro Babase, but will make note of it in the Babase changes log
(seems the best place to record that kind of info).
Let me know if anyone has questions...
Thanks,
Catherine
Catherine Markham wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm writing to follow-up on a recent conversation with Karl about some
> conversion errors popping up in PREGS.
>
> The PREGS table has 4 columns: pid, parity, conceive, and resume. In
> the FoxPro version of Babase, the conceive and resume columns in PREGS
> list cids that link to the CYCLES table so that the user can get the
> ddate/conception date for each conceive and the tdate/resumption date
> for each resume.
>
> The conversion error at hand is that there are 40 pids in PREGS that are
> linked by the conceive field to CYCLES rows without ddates. In other
> words, these pids have a cid listed in their conceive field of PREGS,
> but that cid has a blank ddate in the CYCLES table. In most cases,
> tdate and mdate is also blank.
>
> After some quick querying (will check more thoroughly before making
> changes), most of these 40 pids are associated with live births - only 2
> are for fetal losses. Also, nearly all are for pids in the 101, 102,
> 103, etc. series indicating that the pregnancies probably occurred near
> the start of monitoring.
>
> Regarding birth dates and matgrps, the following was a clear pattern for
> each of the errors. Again, seems to indicate to me that these were
> births near the start of the project or - with Nyayo's - during gaps in
> monitoring. Does that sound right?
>
> Born into Alto's group: births from 1968-1971
> Born into Hook's group: births from 1975-1981
> Born into Lodge group: births from 1982-1985
> Born into Nyayo's group: births from 1992-1994
>
> Assuming that we do not have detailed sexskin data to determine exact
> ddates for each pregnancy, one solution might be to enter ddates for the
> live births based on birth minus average pregnancy duration (Karl and I
> though this was possibly an option we had discussed before). Obviously
> we'd have to do something different for the two fetal loss cases. Also,
> would the average gestation be calculated separately for the Lodge group
> pids?
>
> Finally, Karl mentioned that we could code these calculated ddates in
> Babase as "estimated". Karl, is the column marking estimated dates
> something that will be a lot of extra work to program?
>
> Sorry for the lengthy email,
> Catherine
>
>
--
Catherine Markham
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Princeton University
Phone: (609) 258-6898
Fax: (609) 258-2712
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