Dear colleagues,
When doing anthropometric surveys, ususllay we wish to compare prevalence of malnutrition between different ages group (for exemple 6-29 monts vs 30.59 months) or between sex. (Statistical) comparison of surveys in same areas and periods from consequent years could be also very helpful.

I wonder if such kind of statistical tests could be added to ENA softare in coming versions in order to be able to perform these comparisons using proper tests.

Hi Elisa,

Thank you for posting this question.

There are 2 different things here. First of all, the comparison between the age groups or between boys and girls. ENA provides in the Anrthropometry Results screen prevalence estimates for boys and girls. I think that if your objective at the beginning of the survey was not to compare between those two groups, and hence you haven't consider that during survey planning, then you can only have a general idea once you get the result, because the size of the sample will probably not be large enough for each gender to provide highly meaningful results. Sometimes, you can see without statistical tests whether there is significant difference between two estimates or not, by looking at the overlap of the confidence intervals.

For age groups, it is the same idea. Since different age groups were not taken into account during survey planning, you will end up having a relatively small number in each age group, and so you cannot use the prevalence estimates for decision making about interventions.

Second, you are asking about comparison between different surveys. There is one tool that was developed by Oleg Bilukha from the CDC and that allows this kind of comparison. If you send me an email, I can send it to you.

I hope this answer will help, and please don't hesitate if you have any other question or concern regarding SMART.