The Guatemalan Survey of Family Health (EGSF from its name in Spanish) is now available from RAND and has been sent to ICPSR for inclusion in their archives. The EGSF was designed to examine the way in which rural Guatemalan families and individuals cope with childhood illness and pregnancy, and the role of ethnicity, poverty, social support and health beliefs in this process. It is part of a larger study designed and carried out by Noreen Goldman (Princeton University) and Anne Pebley (RAND), in collaboration with the Nutritional Institute of Central America and Panama in Guatemala, with funding from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Household interviews were conducted in 4,792 households and individual interviews with 2,872 women ages 18 to 35. Community surveys of 3 key informants and a sample of biomedical and nonbiomedical health care providers were conducted in each of the 60 sampled communities. For fuller description of the EGSF, see RAND's Family Life Surveys web page:http://www.rand.org/organization/drd/labor/FLS. Please note that unlike the other FLS data bases (i.e., Malaysian and Indonesian surveys), the EGSF was not designed as a public use or general purpose data set, but rather to meet the needs of a specific research project. While RAND will provide support for this database as it does for FLS databases, the amount of support may be more limited. The EGSF data are available on-line from RAND via the FLS web page and via anonymous ftp. To access the data through anonymous ftp, ftp to ftp.rand.org, use "anonymous" as your login name, and then type "cd software_and_data/FLS/egsf". See the README file for instructions on copying files. The EGSF documentation is available from RAND only in hard-copy form at present. Copies of the documentation (document series DRU-1538) can be ordered via the FLS web page or by directly contacting RAND's Distribution Services, RAND, 1700 Main St., P.O. Box 2138, Santa Monica, CA, 90407-2138; Phone: 310.451.7002; Fax: 310.451.6915; Email: order@rand.org. Questions about the EGSF survey can be directed by email to egsf-supp@rand.org. PLEASE NOTE: To help us maintain an EGSF user's list, we would appreciate users sending their name, address, phone, fax (if relevant), and email address to egsf-supp@rand.org. We can then notify users of any updates to the EGSF data.
The CDC Division of Reproductive Health, in collaboration with the State Family Planning Commission of China, has released Selected Research Papers in English from the 1992 National Fertility and Family Planning Survey. Also available are final reports (all in Spanish) for the reproductive health surveys in Paraguay (1995-96), the Dominican Republic (1992), and Honduras (1996), and a final report concerning reproductive health among Indochinese immigrants in Seattle, Washington. Single copies are available free of charge from the Behavioral Epidemiology and Demographic Research Branch, DRH, CDC, MSK-35, Atlanta GA 30333; Fax: 770.488.5965