The first 1,000 days of life (from pregnancy to a child’s 2nd birthday) are critical for addressing childhood malnutrition, especially stunting. Infant and young child feeding practices (IYCF) largely overlap with this period as they cover breastfeeding and complementary feeding practices for the first two years of a child’s life. They also have a significant impact on childhood health, nutrition outcomes, and child survival. It is, therefore, critical for countries to measure IYCF practices as part of their efforts to monitor their progress toward Sustainable Development Goal 2. It is also important for development agencies to be able to monitor and evaluate their programs aimed at improving infant and young child feeding practices towards improved overall childhood nutrition.
WHO and UNICEF released the first IYCF indicators definition and measurement guidelines in 2008. In 2021, these guidelines were updated along with a revised standard questionnaire to capture the information required to calculate the updated IYCF indicators since the first initial publication. In general, the IYCF indicators can be categorized into three main categories: (1) breastfeeding indicators, (2) complementary indicators, and (3) other indicators, which are focused on bottle-feeding practices and the generation of data visualization plots for the breastfeeding status by age.
Although the initial measurement guidelines were published in 2008 with many humanitarian organizations and country health ministries implementing these indicators, no comprehensive statistical programming package to calculate these indicators is yet available. Therefore, every time the researchers (or humanitarian organizations) are required to collect and analyze, they need a considerable amount of time to re-code all the syntax (depending on which statistical program they are using). That is time-consuming work.
This riycf package aims to address that technical gap by providing an easy-to-use package of automated functions` to calculate all IYCF indicators provided in the WHO guideline (the Indicators for assessing infant and young child feeding practices: definitions and measurement methods). This include comprehensive guidelines for step-by-step usage of each automated function to analyze individual IYCF indicators in R software to make it easier for those less familiar with R software.
if(!require(remotes)) install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("nutriverse/riycf")Based on the WHO guideline’s indicator definition, the riycf package functions will calculate all the IYCF indicators. Each riycf function will perform the following tasks.
- (Beneficial in) Data cleaning: Each IYCF package function will
perform the data quality check to ensure all the required data
(variables) were correctly constructed in the dataset. For example,
the minimum meal frequency indicator analysis requires the following
variables for data analysis: child age, breastfeeding status, and
frequency of child feeding on the previous day. The child age and
child meal frequency data should be present in the
numeric - integerformat, and the breastfeeding status should be coded as a binary true/false variable with yes = 1 and no = 0. The riycf package function will ensure that integer variables are actually integers and variables that need to be re-coded into numeric scores are re-coded. - IYCF indicator generation: The indicator calculation process would
continue if there were no issues with the data entry. The new IYCF
indicator variables will be generated based on which indicators the
user asks to calculate. For example, suppose the user wanted to
calculate whether the beneficiaries meet the minimum meal frequency.
In this case, the user can use the
get_mmffunctions to create a new dichotomous variable that indicates whether each child met the minimum meal frequency. More sample codes from this package were present in each function documentation.
This package also provides the already programmed IYCF Questionnaires (based on WHO sample IYCF questionnaires) in XLS programming format. Detailed guidelines for accessing those forms are provided in the vignette article called “WHO IYCF Questionnaire XLS Forms.” The different types of XLS programmed IYCF questionnaires can download on this Github page.
Please note that the riycf project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.