This paper estimates child mortality by race and nativity for the U.S. as a whole and the Death Registration Area based on the public use micro- samples of the 1900 and 1910 censuses. We compare indirect estimates to mortality rates and parameters based on published census and vital statistics data. The censuses of 1900 and 1910 both asked adult women about children ever born and children surviving which, when tabulated by age or marriage duration can be used to estimate probabilities of their children dying at various ages up to 25. Data on children ever born for 1910 were partially tabulated and published in conjunction with the 1940 federal census but the information on children surviving was never tabulated and published; nor was information from 1900. The public use micro samples of the 1900 census permit the application of these well-established indirect methods. This paper applies the basic indirect age and marriage duration methods, and a method using the backward projection of age distribution of surviving own-children of younger adult women. The results match well to life tables calculated from aggregaed census and vital statistics for the total white, native white and foreign-born white populations. The results are less definite for African-Americans but it seems that mortality was substantialy better than indicated by the widely cited Glover life tables for 1900/02, 1901/10, and 1909/11 for the original the original Death Registration Area of 1900. Overall, however, it appears that calculated life tables from published vital statistics and census popula- tions for the Death Registration Areas of 1900 and 1910 describe the remainder of the population relatively well.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Historical Working Papers with number
0085.
Length: Date of creation: May 1996 Date of revision: Publication status: published as Historical Methods, Vol. 30, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 77-96. Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberhi:0085
Note: DAE Contact details of provider: Postal: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A. Phone: 617-868-3900 Email: Web page: http://www.nber.org More information through EDIRC
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: ().
Related research
Keywords:
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: