CDE INDIGENOUS MORTALITY STUDY

The Indigenous Mortality Study was conducted as part of the ABS Census Data Enhancement (CDE) project. The CDE project consists of a number of studies which brought together data from the 2011 Census of Population and Housing and other specified datasets.

For more information on the CDE project, see the following paper: Information Paper: Deaths Registration to Census Linkage Project - Methodology and Quality Assessment, Australia, 2011-2012 (cat. no. 3302.0.55.004).

The aims of the CDE Indigenous Mortality Study were to:

• assist in understanding the differences in recording of Indigenous status between death registrations and Census data; and
• assess the under-identification of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander deaths in death registrations records.

The CDE Indigenous Mortality Study involved linking Census records with death registration records to examine differences in the reporting of Indigenous status across the two datasets. Specifically the study linked 2011 Census records with all registered deaths that occurred from 10 August 2011 to 27 September 2012.

In the absence of any unique identifier in the Census and deaths datasets, linking was performed using probabilistic methods. Three groups of variables, name (first name and surname), personal characteristics (date of birth, age, sex, place of birth, year of arrival and marital status), and geographic information (street number, street name, suburb, mesh block and postcode) were used to link death records to Census records. Variables common to both datasets were standardised to ensure consistent coding and formatting. The two datasets were linked in a way that was independent of reported Indigenous status so that any future analysis would not be affected by bias introduced in the linking process. For this reason, Indigenous status was not used as a linking variable.

The 2011 Death registrations to Census linkage project expanded on the methods used in the 2006 cycle as described in the research paper Linking Census Records to Death Registrations (cat. no. 1351.0.55.030). The main enhancements implemented for the 2011 project included:

• improvements to linking software and hardware
• improvements to data cleaning and standardisation - particularly names
• refinements to the blocking and linking strategy
• use of the Expectation-Maximisation algorithm for estimating linkage model parameters
• increased and targeted clerical review on record pairs where the death registration was for a person identified as being of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent.

Internationally, similar record linkage studies have been conducted in New Zealand where the 1981, 1986, 1991, 1996 and 2001 Censuses were each anonymously and probabilistically linked to three years of subsequent deaths data, allowing a comparison of ethnicity recording (Ajwani et al., 2003; Blakely et al., 2002a; Blakely et al., 2002b). Large nationally representative studies based on linked Census and deaths data have also been conducted in the United Kingdom, France, Sweden and Netherlands. The results from these studies have been used in various ways including the provision of evidence for policy decisions and the setting of policy targets for special intervention programs.

Previous Page

Next Page