BIBLIOGRAPHIC INPUT SHEET TEMPORARY Patterns of mortality ...

Chater XI.v
Socioeconomic and Related Factors
One of the Investigation's goals was to
study the interrelationships of diseases and
factors responsible for mortality. To provide
a background for the study of socioeconomic
data, information is presented
first on the presence of parents in the homes
of deceased children and on their marital
status. The information obtained in the
home interviews on occupation of father and
education of mother is then analyzed.
A classic study on mortality by occupation
of deceased males in 10 states of the
United States was made by Whitney (1934).
Puffer (1948), on analyzing mortality in
Tennessee, found that tuberculosis death
rates in white males were three times higher
for laborers than for professional workers.
Additional analyses have been made in the
United States using matched data from
death certificates and from census schedules
for 1950 (Guralniek, 1959). The English
have studied mortality for five social classes
as well as for specific occupation groups at
10-year intervals, beginning with data from
the 1921 census (Registrar-General, England
and Wales, 1927, 1938). Chase (1961-
1963), in her studies of infant mortality in
Upstate New York, included occupation of
father as one of the measures of socioeconomic
level,
As pointed out by Kitagawa and Hauser
(1963), in the United States the only item
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on the death certificate providing a measure
of socioeconomic status is occupation, but
its usefulness is limited because of the discrepancies
between usual occupation as recorded
on the certificate and the last occupation
entered on the census schedule. Those
authors conducted a study in which death
certificates for a four-month period in that
country were matched with census schedules
for 1 April 1960; from those schedules they
obtained sufficient data on several socioeconomic
variables, including occupation
and education, for analyses of differential
mortality. They found education to be a
satisfactory measure of socioeconomic
status (Kitagawa and Hauser, 1968).
Rosenwaike (1971) utilized the education
attainment of mothers as a measure of
socioeconomic status in studying the incidence
of low birth weight in Maryland in
1968. He found that among white mothers
with less than 10 years' schooling the incidence
of births of products weighing 2,500
grains or less was 10.7 per cent, which was
more than twice the percentage for mothers
with four years of college (4.4). This same
author, in referring to a paper by Hendricks
(1967), stated the following in regard
to education as a parameter of socioeconomic
status: "Education itself has been
called a common denominator among the
factors interrelated in the maternal, biolog­