New Article in “Population” • 26.04.2022Significant Differences in Cause-of-Death Coding Practices between and within Countries

Because dissimilarities in certifying and coding underlying causes of death may undermine the usefulness and reliability of cause-of-death statistics, consistency in the cause-specific mortality data within a country can be regarded as one criterion of data quality. This article assesses the subnational consistency in cause-of-death statistics in four countries: Russia, Germany, the United States and France.

The authors estimated the shares of major groups of causes in the mortality structures of subnational regions and compared them with the interregional average values. Next, they visualised the deviations on heat map matrices, pinpointing the regions and causes that deviate the most, the causes with high within-country variability and the regions with unique mortality structure.

Among the countries the authors examined, France has the most consistent cause-of-death data across its regions, while Russia has the largest number of outliers. They also found that causes of death with no strict diagnostic criteria (e.g. ill-defined) tend to display higher variability, while the shares of more easily diagnosed underlying causes are more stable across regions.

Danilova, Inna A.; Rau, Roland; Barbieri, Magali; Grigoriev, Pavel; Jdanov, Dmitri A.; Meslé, France; Vallin, Jacques; Shkolnikov, Vladimir M. (2022): Subnational consistency of cause-of-death mortality data: The cases of Russia, Germany, the United States, and France. Population: English Edition 76(4): 645–674. [Also available in French language]