Citation

Johnston LG, McLaughlin KR, Rouhani SA, Bartels SA. J. Epidemiol. Glob. Health 2016; 7(1): 45-53.

Affiliation

Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, Cambridge, MA, USA; Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; Department of Emergency Medicine, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, MA, USA; Queen's University, Kingston General Hospital, Kingston, ON, Canada. Electronic address: susanabartels@gmail.com.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2016, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.jegh.2016.08.003

PMID

27663900

Abstract

Successive sampling (SS)-population size estimation (PSE) is a technique used to estimate the sizes of hidden populations using data collected in respondent-driven sampling (RDS) surveys. We here assess past estimations and use new data from an RDS survey to calculate a new PSE. In 2012, 852 adult women in South Kivu Province, Democratic Republic of Congo, who self-identified as survivors of sexual violence, resulting in a pregnancy, since the start of the war (in 1996) were sampled using RDS. We used imputed visibility, enrollment order, and prior estimates for PSE using SS-PSE in RDS Analyst. Prior estimates varied between Congolese local experts and researchers. We calculated the PSE of women with a sexual violence-related pregnancy in South Kivu using researchers' priors to be approximately 17,400. SS-PSE is an effective method for estimating the population sizes of hidden populations, useful for providing evidence for services and resource allocation. SS-PSE is beneficial because population sizes can be calculated after conducting the survey and do not rely on separate studies or additional data (as in network scale-up, multiplier, and capture-recapture methods).

Copyright © 2016. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Language: en