Dissertation

Des systèmes d'enregistrement des décès par cause en France et en Allemagne, thèse de doctorat de démographie

Bubenheim, M.
172 pages. Lyon, Université Lumière (Lyon 2) (2000)

Abstract

When it comes to comparing mortality by cause of death between different countries, it is clear that an analysis of the registration systems would help avoid biases, which can result from different ways producing statistical information. As several studies have concluded that the transmission of the cause of death sometimes poses a problem in France, we try to find out whether the group of deaths for which the cause is not transmitted to the coding centre is made up by some particular categories of deaths only. With this aim in view, we first describe how the information collected about the deceased - and in particular the death certificate - was supposed to be transmitted to the coding centre. Then we are interested in the completeness of the cause of death statistics. What results from our analysis is that because of the way the information on the cause of death is transmitted, imputing a death to the rubric of unknown causes probably depends on the real cause of death in both France and Germany. Hence, it may be that the mechanism which generated the unknow causes of death cannot be ignored. However, in order to compare cause-specific mortality in France with that in Germany, it seems to us that it is insufficient to analyse only the relation between the way the information on the cause of death is transmitted and the deaths of unknown cause. Rather it is proper to use the information we have on the registration systems so as to choose a method which will allow us to take into account the different degrees of imprecision of the French and German cause of death statistics. It turns out that the different degrees of imprecision may be an origin of bias that does not always seem negligible to us when we compare mortality by cause of death. (ABSTRACT: http://phebus.univ-lyon2.fr:9020/GetRef=theses.2571.)
The Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock is one of the leading demographic research centers in the world. It's part of the Max Planck Society, the internationally renowned German research society.