The 1995 Guatemalan Survey of Family Health (EGSF)

The Guatemalan Survey of Family Health, known as EGSF from its name in Spanish, 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 (INCAP) in Guatemala, with funding from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

The EGSF sampling frame includes all rural communities in four of Guatemala's 22 departments. While the survey is not based on a nationally representative sample, the four departments included in the study were selected to encompass a wide range of social, cultural, economic, and environmental conditions in rural Guatemala. Household interviews were conducted in 4,792 households and individual interviews with 2,872 women ages 18 to 35. In each of the 60 sampled communities, we also carried out a community survey in which 3 key informants and a sample of biomedical and nonbiomedical health care providers were interviewed.

A fuller description of the EGSF is available.

More detailed information on the EGSF is provided in the EGSF documentation. See below for information about obtaining the documentation.

An EGSF bibliography is also available.

Obtaining EGSF Data and Documentation

Please note that unlike the other FLS databases (e.g., 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 and documentation are available on-line from RAND via the web; see the EGSF_README file for more information.

The EGSF data and documentation are also available from the National Archive of Computerized Data on Aging (NACDA) public holdings of the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), based at the University of Michigan. You may download the surveys directly from the NACDA public web site. Those who need data on other media must contact ICSPR directly.

You may also request the documentation in hard copy form from RAND:

Distribution Services
RAND Corporation
1776 Main St.
P.O. Box 2138
Santa Monica, CA 90407-2138
Phone: 310-451-7002
FAX: 310-451-6915
E-mail: order@rand.org

If you have questions about the EGSF survey, please send e-mail to guat-supp@rand.org.

PLEASE NOTE: To help us maintain an EGSF user's list, we would appreciate it if users would send their name, address, phone, fax (if relevant) and, especially, their e-mail address to guat-supp@rand.org. We can then notify users of any updates to the EGSF data.

Updates to the EGSF data are also available at this website. Please review these updates when you access the data.