Community corner—VCQI: Stata programs for standardized survey data analysis
Vaccination rates have been a hot topic in the news recently because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the study of vaccination rates is certainly not new. In fact, the World Health Organization (WHO) has long provided advice on conducting and analyzing surveys designed to better understand the coverage of many types of vaccines.
At the 2021 Stata Conference, Dale Rhoda's presentation introduced us to a set of Stata programs called vaccination coverage quality indicators (VCQI) for analysis of data from surveys about coverage of various types of vaccines. Any researcher interested in analyzing data from their own vaccine coverage survey can put their data into the required formats and use VCQI to analyze the results with methods that adhere to the WHO's guidelines.
The VCQI packages have been carefully developed with attention to version control, clear documentation, and testing. The code is also freely shared so that others can see how it works.
If you are interested in analyzing your own surveys of vaccine coverage, make sure you look at everything VCQI provides. You can even discuss VCQI with others in the VCQI User's Group.
