Final Report (PDF, 2132K) - Measure DHS

6. MORTALITY AND HEALTH6.1 MortalityIn the ODHS, mortality data were collected primarily for the purpose of estimating infant andchild mortality rates. In this section mortality rates are calculated, using direct estimation procedures, for:Infant mortality, the probability of dying between birth and exact age one;Child mortality, the probability of dying between age one and exact age five;Under five mortality, the probability of dying between birth and exact age five.Rates are calculated on a period basis (i.e., utilizing infonnation on deaths and exposure tomortality during a specific time period) rather than on a birth cohort basis. A complete description of themethodology for computing period-specific mortality probabilities is given elsewhere (Rutstein, 1984).Birth History Survivorship DataThe data for the estimation of mortality rates were collected in the reproduction section of theindividual woman's questionnaire. The data were obtained in the form of a truncated birth history inwhich questions were asked about the sex, date of birth, survivorship status and, if appropriate, age atdeath of the respondent's live births.The truncated birth history collected information on all births which occurred to respondentsduring the time period 1981-86. As a result of this procedure, the observed person-years of exposure tomortality are less for the older childhood ages (ages 3 and 4) than for the younger childhood ages (ages 1and 2). The decline in the number of persons exposed to mortality should not substantially increase thesampling variance of the estimated child mortality rates because older children contribute relatively littleto the overall child mortality rate. Nevertheless, in the tables of this chapter, any reported mortality ratewhich is based on fewer than 500 person-years of exposure is enclosed in parentheses.Data QualityThe truncated birth history is susceptible to the same types of data collection errors as are otherretrospective procedures; namely, underreporting of events, misreporting of age at death, andmisreporting of date of birth. Event underreporting and age at death misreporting are the more serioussources of error for mortality estimation. The ODHS data were investigated with respect to these twosources of error by testing their internal consistency. However, it should be stated that the power ofintemal consistency checks for detecting error is quite limited so that, while they can detect gross defects,they cannot detect less serious data problems and cannot defmitively establish the accuracy of the datacollected.Underreporting of deaths is most likely in the case of babies who die in early infancy. In theODHS, age at death was recorded in one of three units: days, for deaths in the first month of life; months,for deaths under two years of age; and years, for deaths at age two and above. A test to detectunderreporting of early infant deaths was made by forming the ratio of deaths under seven days to alldeaths in the first month of life. Since mortality is known to decline steeply with age throughout earlyinfancy, the value of this ratio should exceed 0.25. For the period 1981-86, the values of this ratio from53