Introduction

Tabulations of deaths and death rates in demographic publications may be planned for the purpose of providing one or other of the following:

1. (1) an analysis of mortality by various characteristics of the living – age and sex, for instance – and of its changes from time to time in these respects;

2. (2) a subdivision of the data by ‘cause of death’, as certified by a doctor, and a study of the changes from time to time in the distribution of deaths according to cause;

3. (3) a combination of (1) and (2) – as in occupational mortality investigations.

This chapter will follow a similar tripartite form. The next twelve sections discuss the effects on mortality of such influences as age, year of birth, lapse of time since a significant event, marital status and geographical region. Here, in general, different medical ‘causes’ of death will not be considered separately. In a further seven sections, however, attention will be directed to the various main causes of death and their incidence. Finally, occupational and social-class differences in death rates will be illustrated. The data on which the observations must be based are necessarily those for countries, and periods, for which reliable information is available.

The demographer's attitude towards the analysis of mortality is somewhat different from his approach to fertility statistics; this is because the characteristics of the two are different. Mortality is almost entirely involuntary and therefore is little influenced by the changes attributable to human volition to which fertility is subject. When wars and pandemics are excluded, mortality experience may follow, in the long term, a reasonably well-defined trend, less sensitive than fertility to short-term variations of a kind that are particularly difficult to predict.