Indian Couples Contraceptive Behaviour: Analysing NFHS data using Hierarchical Linear Modelling

India’s National Family Health Survey datasets are hierarchical (subjects nested in groups) in nature. NFHS 3 datasets apart from providing information on Households and Individuals characteristics also gave information on couple’s characteristics. Couple’s dataset pose a particular challenge for statistical analysis as each group consists of two subjects’ male or female, or the hierarchy being couple/dyads. Challenge in analysing such data is that the variations may occur at the individual or dyadic level. Secondly the dyadic data are not independent, violating the assumption of independent observations. Also as the group size is small (male and female) it poses analytical challenges. Hierarchical Linear Models are used for analysing couples data using SAS PROC GLMMIX procedure. The challenge of correlated observations/response in couple’s dataset is taken care of using the GLMMIX procedure.