Approximating children's potential environmental exposures with cross-sectional surveys in Stata

Messy matching across space and time with MICS and EM-DAT children's environmental exposures accumulate across the life course. Yet longitudinal, geocoded data that could capture cumulative exposures are scarce in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where most of the world's children live. More commonly available in such settings are cross-sectional surveys of one-time-point snapshots of each child. This presentation uses a cross-national survey of children in LMICs to demonstrate how to approximate potential environmental exposure: aligning each child's life course with dated environmental hazard events, summing exposure over meaningful developmental windows, and assessing the reasonableness of the approach. Matching survey data to external hazard records can be imprecise. Spatial matching can be messy if place names are labeled inconsistently, geocoding is coarse or uneven in scope, or assumptions about where a child has lived must be made. Temporal matching can be messy if caregiver-reported birth dates and the start and end dates of hazard events are inexact. Approximate exposures are cumulative but potential rather than observed. The presentation will discuss steps to match round-six multiple indicator cluster survey (MICS6) data from seven Asian LMICs to hazard data from the emergency events database (EM-DAT). The product is a child-level panel that aggregates exposure over the first 1,000 days, in recent years, and in the interval between. The presentation will also demonstrate an option available in MICS6 for assessing a central threat to this design: the assumption that children have not moved. The steps outlined here facilitate research on environmental exposures and their implications for children in the absence of geocoded longitudinal data. Adding more detailed location histories to cross-sectional surveys could extend the approach to longer windows and to adult populations. Empirical paper used in this illustration: Zhang, Y., J. R. Behrman, E. Hannum, M. U. Mahmud, and F. Wang. 2025. Are natural disasters disastrous for education? Evidence from seven Asian countries. Report No. 1492. Asian Development Bank Institute. https://doi.org/10.56506/RYSP7608.