Impact of jittering on raster- and distance-based geostatistical analyses of DHS data

Fine-scale covariate rasters are routinely used in geostatistical models for mapping demographic and health indicators based on household surveys from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) program. However, the geostatistical analyses ignore the fact that GPS coordinates in DHS surveys are jittered for privacy purposes. We demonstrate the need to account for this jittering, and we propose a computationally efficient approach that can be routinely applied. We use the new method to analyse the prevalence of completion of secondary education for 20-49 year old women in Nigeria in 2018 based on the 2018 DHS survey. The analysis demonstrates substantial changes in the estimates of spatial range and fixed effects compared to when we ignore jittering. Through a simulation study that mimics the dataset, we demonstrate that accounting for jittering reduces attenuation in the estimated coefficients for covariates and improves predictions. The results also show that the common approach of averaging covariate values in windows around the observed locations does not lead to the same improvements as accounting for jittering.