Death Rates
Death rates refer to the number of deaths occurring in a specific population over a given period of time, often expressed as a rate per 1,000 or 100,000 individuals. They are a key measure in understanding the health and well-being of a population, and are used to assess the impact of diseases, accidents, and other factors on mortality within a community.
7 Key excerpts on "Death Rates"
eBook - ePubPopulation Geography
A Systematic Exposition
- Mohammad Izhar Hassan(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge India(Publisher)
...11 Mortality and life table Mortality, or the occurrence of death, is another component of population change. Unlike fertility, mortality is more stable and predictable, and is less prone to unique fluctuations. While fertility behaviour of a population depends on a set of social, demographic, psychological and economic factors, mortality is a biological phenomenon. Death control is universally acceptable in all societies of the world. The Death Rates have, therefore, undergone a more rapid decline than that of the birth rates. It is this decline in the Death Rates, rather than any increase in the birth rates, which has been responsible for rapid growth in the world population during the recent past. Temporal changes in Death Rates not only affect the size of a population but also its age composition, which has important bearings on the social, economic and demographic conditions in an area. The study of mortality is, therefore, useful for analysing the current demographic conditions as well as for determining the prospect of potential change in the mortality conditions in the future. The analysis of mortality is of vital importance to planners and policy makers in the provision of basic health care services in any population. The analytical study of mortality can be described as the study of ‘the risk of dying’ in different populations or different groups in a population. The meaning of the term ‘death’ does not involve any ambiguity and, therefore, it facilitates the measurement of mortality. The UN and WHO have defined the term as ‘the permanent disappearance of all evidence of life at any time after birth’. The vital registration or civil registration system provides data on deaths in a country. However, in a country where such registration system is absent or inadequate, statistics on mortality are obtained from periodic censuses and sample surveys. It should, however, be noted that periodic censuses do not provide data on mortality directly...
eBook - ePubAn Introduction to Population Geographies
Lives Across Space
- Holly R. Barcus, Keith Halfacree(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...per hour! As with births (Chapter 4), deaths are major occurrences for all involved, significant at a range of socio-spatial scales: family, community, nation, global humanity. They are typically memorialized through ritual behaviors such as ceremonial gatherings marking burials and cremations. Death marks the end of an individual’s life course, the culmination of a life across space, the ultimate bodily immobility. Within Demography, mortality expresses “the frequency with which death occurs in a population” (Poston and Bouvier 2010: 391). As with fertility, statistics-based measures have been devised to understand better its patterns and trends (Holdsworth et al. 2013: 10, 76–78; Poston and Bouvier 2010: 112–120; Weeks 2005). Four are particularly useful but increase in both sophistication and data demands as one proceeds through them. First, Crude Death Rate (CDR) expresses total number of deaths occurring in a specified population over a specific period of time. For a given year it is calculated thus: CDR uses the estimated mid-year population of the area of interest as denominator and, paralleling CBR for fertility (4.1.2), is usually presented per 1,000 people. As a rate, CDR is comparable across countries and localities. However, it does not provide any indication of who is dying or why, nor does it allow for age composition of a population (expressed in population pyramids; 3.2.2). To account for population age structure, mortality rates can be “adjusted” or “standardized.” This gives a second measure of mortality: Age Specific Death Rate (ASDR). Again as with ASFRs (4.1.2), ASDRs are usually calculated for 5-year groupings. Of particular note is Infant Mortality Rate (IMR), the ASDR for those aged under 1 year. IMR is “one of the strongest indicators of a country’s wellbeing, as it reflects social, economic and environmental conditions in which children (and others in society) live, including their health care” (Alderman and Behrman 2004: vii)...
eBook - ePubApplied Demography
An Introduction To Basic Concepts, Methods, And Data
- Steve H. Murdock(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Mortality refers to the incidence of deaths in a population. It is commonly distinguished from morbidity which refers to the incidence of disease in a population. It is often discussed in terms of the contravailing process of survival-that is, the probability of surviving over a given period of time. Mortality in the United States and other developed nations has tended to demonstrate the presence of what some refer to as an epidemiological transition (Preston, 1976). This is a shift in an area from conditions in which a majority of deaths occur from infectious diseases (pneumonia, diarrhea, dysentery, etc.) to ones in which chronic diseases (coronary disease, cancer, etc.) are the major causes of death. Mortality tends to also be differentiated by socioeconomic factors such that mortality is substantially higher among those with more limited socioeconomic resources. As discussed in detail below, the analysis of mortality is often completed using a set of procedures referred to as life-table techniques, techniques in which the distribution and impacts of deaths over time are simulated in a hypothetical population. Because it is one indicator of an area's likely level of economic development, infant mortality (deaths to persons during their first year of life) is often used as a measure of socioeconomic development in analyses of socioeconomic conditions. Migration. Migration refers to the movement of persons in a population from one area to another. Unlike the demographic processes of fertility and mortality, migration is not discretely fixed in time and space, that is, to define migration requires that one define when and how far someone has moved. Migration is usually distinguished from both daily patterns of movement and short-distance permanent moves...
eBook - ePubHealthcare Delivery in the U.S.A.
An Introduction
- Margaret Schulte, DBA(Authors)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Productivity Press(Publisher)
...Health status is measured from a variety of factors; however, the primary measures used are mortality (death) rates, morbidity (illness) rates, life expectancy, and infant mortality rates. As Jonas and Kovner (2) said, “there are not as yet any generally accepted direct measures of health” (p. 16), so we continue to rely on the traditional measures of mortality and morbidity. Table 2.1 provides aggregate data of mortality, life expectancy and infant mortality rates in the U.S. Table 2.1 Overall Mortality and Life Expectancy in the United States, 2018 Deaths 2,839,205 Death rate 86.7 deaths per 100,000 Life expectancy (at birth) 78.7 years Infant Mortality Rate 5.66 deaths per 1,000 live births Source: National Center for Health Statistics. National Vital Statistics System. Mortality Statistics. Mortality in the United States, 2018. Available at https://ww.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/deaths.htm 2.2.1 Mortality Mortality rates are used as the measure of deaths within a population. These measures are reported by the CDC as aggregate mortality rates for the overall population and for sub-groups within the population such as those based on gender, race, age, and other demographic characteristics. They are also provided in more granular detail for causes of death such as cancer, coronary disease, and so on. The CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) reports mortality rates by cause per 100,000 population. The causes of death are reported in terms of deaths as a percentage of total deaths as well as the number of deaths from each cause in the United States. As would be expected, mortality rates have changed over the years as medical care has improved, as access to care has expanded since the implementation of Medicare and Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, and as environmental factors have changed (e.g., reduction in environmental hazards such as poor water quality) and education and income levels have changed. On average, the U.S...
eBook - ePubSocial Death
Questioning the life-death boundary
- Jana Králová, Tony Walter, Jana Králová, Tony Walter(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...What is social death? Jana Králová Department of Social and Policy Sciences, Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath, Bath, UK Social death is on many occasions used too broadly by academics in several different disciplines, creating ambiguity around its application. Conceptual clarification is needed, not least because of the importance of the empirical topics to which the concept has been applied, such as genocide, slavery and dementia. Analysis of repeatedly occurring structural similarities in diverse studies of social death reveals three underlying notions: a loss of social identity, a loss of social connectedness and losses associated with disintegration of the body. The article concludes firstly, that social death is a multifaceted phenomenon with a single conceptual framework; secondly, that in order to preserve the concept’s theoretical potential it should only be used for the most extreme circumstances whereby most or all of the key facets are severely compromised and/or lost; thirdly, that social death might be usefully seen as the opposite of well-being, so that well-being and social death each clarify the meaning of the other. Introduction What is social death? The term has been used by a wide range of scholars from different disciplines, working in different substantive fields, and – this article argues – not entirely consistently. The need for conceptual clarity is highlighted by the increasing, but often varied, use of the term. In the past six years, three substantial academic books (Cacho, 2012; Guenther, 2013; Norwood, 2009) have been published with social death in their title or subtitle. After briefly sketching the history of social science’s use of ‘social death’, the article analyses some key studies using the concept in order to identify its central components. The term ‘social death’ first entered social science vocabulary with Sudnow’s (1967) study of social processes surrounding death...
eBook - ePub- David Beales(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- CRC Press(Publisher)
...CHAPTER 2 The demography of old age Tony Warnes Demography and population ageing Demography is the study of the size and structure of human populations. It has mainly been concerned with the rates of births and deaths and the ages at which they occur. Fertility, migration and mortality determine the rate of growth or decline of a population and its age structure. In pre-industrial Europe, and in some of the poorest countries of the world today, both fertility and mortality rates were and are very high. Each female gives birth to many children during her reproductive years, but relatively few babies survive beyond one year of age, and even among older children and young adults (especially mothers), mortality rates are much higher than in the affluent world today. Average life expectancy from birth can be as low as 30 years and has rarely been more than 40 years. The result is a population with a very young age structure. In Bangladesh, more than 40% of the population are less than 16 years of age and only 3% are at least 65 years of age. The UK has a very different demographic structure. The major change began in several north-west European countries during the second half of the nineteenth century. Rates of mortality decreased, more infants survived and family sizes increased. Some decades later a rapid fall in fertility began. There have been reverses (as with high mortality rates during major wars and high birth rates after them) and long pauses too, but by the present day, in virtually the whole of Europe, north America, Australasia and Japan, a ‘demographic transition’ to unprecedentedly low fertility and mortality has been completed. Each female gives birth to few children during her life (rarely more than three). Very few babies die as infants, and mortality rates up to 50 years of age are exceedingly low. Average life expectancy has increased to at least 70 years of age...
eBook - ePubClass and Health
Research and Longitudinal Data
- Richard G. Wilkinson, Richard G. Wilkinson(Authors)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Great Britain. Note: Figures are SMRs—which express age-adjusted mortality rates as a percentage of the national average at each date. Source: DHSS (1980), Table 3.1. The figures in Table 1.1 provided the core of the Black Report: indeed, as the best record we have of the changing social distribution of health in British society, they may be seen as its rationale. The issue of the size and trends in class differences in mortality that these figures raise is clearly crucial, not only to health but to our understanding of the direction of modern social development. The problems of measurement are complicated, however, and the different interpretations of the data are controversial and have far-reaching implications. This chapter provides a discussion of the issues and reviews what recent research, including some of that presented in subsequent chapters of this volume, can tell us about how we should interpret the key figures in Table 1.1. The issues involved can only be disentangled by a careful assessment of the evidence. The real size and trends in class differences in mortality are important not only because health matters in itself but also because health serves as a barometer of the social and economic conditions in which people live. Though we can quantify changes in class access to housing, education, jobs, and services, and can also describe some of the wider but perhaps less tangible changes in the social and physical environment in which people live, we do not know what all these changes add up to in human terms. There is no unified summary of changing class differentials in the quality of life and human welfare. Familiar summary measures of changes in the standard of living, such as indices of real income, suffer from a number of important weaknesses. Economic indicators are largely blind to the qualitative changes in the material and social environment, which are so crucial to human welfare...
