Indirect methods of mortality and fertility estimation: new techniques for new realities

At present maternal mortality in Bangladesh are 194 per 100,000 live births. Unavailability of human resources especially skilled provider, shortage of logistics/supplies and delay of clients to come to the facility, are the major causes of deaths at the health facility. Under pay-for-performance (P4P) at the facility based operation research, maternal and perinatal death review was introduced in the two intervention districts to contain deaths and take appropriate preventive measures. In order to carry out death reviews, facility-based death review teams formed and data was collected through death notification slip, death review form and agreed standard procedure. Findings shows that, 3 maternal deaths and 102 perinatal deaths occurs at the selected health facilities during the intervention period in these two districts. Most of the client admitted at the facility with unconsciousness and shock. Majority of neonatal deaths were due to perinatal asphyxia, sepsis, and birth trauma. Delay in decision making of client’s family, shortage of manpower and logistics at facilities, delay to refer are the major causes of maternal and perinatal death. Data collection on death and analysis of causes of death at the facility will contribute to take appropriate action to reduce maternal and perinatal death.

Total fertility rate of most of developed countries and some developing countries reached to blow replacement level and every period we witness of reduce of total fertility rate in some developing or middle income countries.
About 53 countries of the world are in the middle income level in 2010. We classified these Countries to three groups by total fertility rate:
First; Countries that their total fertility rates over than replacement level, second are reached at replacement level and third are below replacement level.
Total fertility rate of the two countries among above countries has not reported. From the rest of these countries, 22 countries are in group 1, 2 countries are in group 2 and 27 countries are in group 3.
This study is going to assess the main socioeconomic indices of 27 middle-income countries in which their total fertility rate has not reached at replacement level, and according to this index, their future level of decline and the time of their replacement level can be expected.
Methodology of this study is Panel Data Analysis. “Panel data” refers to the pooling of observations on a cross-section of countries, firms, etc, and needed data are worked out from Population Division of United States, World Bank and Statistical Year Books.

Childhood and Adult Mortality (CAM) remain public health problems in Nigeria. Despite variations in socio-cultural and access to health care in regions in Nigeria which have been linked with mortality, literature on differential in CAM by region is scarce. Among the available few, information in which their estimates were based are often unreliable due to problems with death data. This study was designed to fill the gap. It utilized NDHS 2008(n=33,385), women-data. Brass 1-parameter & INDEPTH life tables were used to estimate CAM respectively. The survival probability of females was higher than males at both childhood and adulthood. Under-5 mortality was found to be highest in northwest (Males: 1q0=153/1000; 5q0=223/1000 and Females: 1q0=132/1000; 5q0=205/1000) and lowest in southwest (Males: 1q0=71/1000; 5q0=95/1000 and Females: 1q0=56/1000; 5q0=78/1000). Also, probability of dying at age 60 when an individual has survived to age 15(45q15) was lowest in southwest (Male=0.3344;Females=0.2756), highest in northwest (Male=0.4968; Females=0.4072) and higher among males than females. Mortality in Nigeria is high and hard hit region is northwest. The refined estimates of under-5 mortality in Nigeria obtained in this study are higher than estimates in NDHS report. Thus, there might be need for data adjustment in the subsequent report.

The under-5 mortality rate (U5MR) is an important measure of the well-being of a country’s children, and its estimation is particularly critical as we approach the deadline of Millennium Development Goal 4 to reduce U5MR by two-thirds between 1990 and 2015. However, for the great majority of developing countries without well-functioning vital registration systems, estimating levels and trends in under-5 mortality is challenging, not only because of limited data availability but also because of issues with data quality. Global estimates of child mortality are often constructed without accounting for potential biases in data series which may lead to inaccurate point estimates and/or uncertainty intervals. We propose a Bayesian spline regression model for assessing levels and trends in the U5MR, whereby biases in data series are estimated for each source type through the inclusion of a multilevel model to improve upon the drawbacks of current methods. Preliminary results show that the proposed model is able to flexibly capture changes in U5MR over time and gives point estimates and uncertainty intervals that reflect potential biases in data series.

This paper aims to study the evolution of adult mortality in small areas in Brazil from 1980 to 2010. We use 45q15 as a summary measure of adult mortality across small areas in Brazil. In order to produce the estimates, we propose a methodological approach that combines death distribution methods (DDM) to indirect standardization and Bayesian statistics, in order to produce more reliable estimates of adult mortality for small areas. We focus on adult mortality because there are much more studies on infant and child mortality for sub-national population using indirect demographic techniques (Souza, Hill and Dal Poz, 2010; Castro and Simões, 2009). The studies on child and infant mortality are also showing a convergence of levels across regions in Brazil, thus the main changes in life expectancy in recent years should be explained by changes and variation in adult mortality levels.

In this paper, we propose a new model life table system that is parsimonious and adequately captures the range of age patterns of mortality observed in real populations and yield high predictive validity, not just measured by summary indices such as life expectancy at birth, but more importantly by age specific mortality rates. It provides satisfactory estimates of age specific mortality for countries with high levels of mortality, especially those plagued by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Finally, this new model could generate age specific mortality with a plausible time trend.

In the absence of a well-functioning vital registration system to track mortality in a population, health planners often rely on routine health surveys to provide this most basic health information. Sibling survival histories, where a survey respondent is asked about each of his or her siblings’ births and, if applicable, deaths, provide a direct way to estimate adult mortality by survey. The purpose of this paper is to refine the methods which account for the selection bias, zero-surviving reporters and recall bias inherent in these surveys to generate plausible estimates of adult mortality rates even in the presence of a relationship between family size and adult mortality.

We have implemented changes to the previous method, referred to as the Corrected Sibling Survival (CSS) method, such that it (1) uses appropriate survival weights that account for the study design, and (2) recovers the mortality experience of the families that are not represented because none of the siblings is alive and eligible to respond to the survey. We validate these methodological developments in a range of simulation environments. We also present new ways of adjusting for recall bias and handling sparse data in survey designs where the age range of the respondents is narrower than the age range desired for estimation.

In this paper, an attempt has been made to explore the uses and importance of the models used to explain the human fertility through real data for the researchers presently working in the field of demography. Generally, the levels and trends of human fertility can be easily obtained from the descriptive study of the real data. But some inherent characteristics of the phenomena, human fertility, are found only by applying the appropriate model to the real demographic dataset. The present paper is mainly focused on the models for first birth interval (FBI) as FBI is one of the important determinants of human fertility. In this study, different models are considered and their parameters are estimated by applying it to the real data of the FBI under the different sampling frames. Here the different sampling frames are taken as different ages at marriage since ages at marriage play a significant role in shaping the length of the FBI. These models are applied to the real data set of different major states of the country obtained from National Family Health Survey III. Through the application of the models proposed, different inherent characteristics of human fertility are obtained from the estimates of parameters included in the models.

The interaction of migration with fertility and mortality is key for demographic dynamics at subnational and local levels. Despite this, standard measures of mortality and reproduction treat migration only as a nuisance to be removed, without ever assessing the extent to which processes are affected by migration. Indicators of replacement that incorporate the effect of migration like the Birth Replacement Ratio, have the limitation of not being defined at the age-specific level. We estimate new cohort and period measures of mortality and reproduction that include the interaction with migration for the set of Spanish provinces in the period 1858-2010. The new measures only require vital registration data classified by age, and provide age-specific estimates that incorporate the effects of migration. When migration is low, the measures can be regarded as indirect estimates of mortality and reproduction that do not require population denominators. When migration is high, they should be regarded as the results of the interaction of demographic processes in that particular population. Given the large provincial contrasts in fertility, mortality and migration, it is possible to characterize the role of migration patterns in the vital events registered in the provinces over a period that covers most of demographic transition.

Constructing a life table and using it to estimate life expectancy requires valid and detailed data on mortality and population. Iran, similar to other developing countries, does not have a complete death registration system. In an attempt to estimate life expectancy, several studies have been conducted in Iran based on survey or census data. However, due to the inaccuracy and inconsistency of the results, indirect methods have also been used, and in some cases different results, were obtained. In this paper, the details of several studies that have been carried out to construct life tables for Iran and consequently to estimate life expectancy are reviewed. In this study, not only were trends in child mortality re – estimated for the period 1956 – 2021 by using the Brass method (children ever born and children surviving ) based on data from previous surveys, but also life table were estimated for Iran for the period 1956-2021using the West model from the Coale and Demeny regional life table (1983).
In addition, to estimate life expectancy for those years for which there were no observed data and to make projections, the logistic regression model was used.