Strengthening Qualitative Research through Methodological Innovation and Integration: A Longitudinal Analysis of Human Mortality

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SES#: 0961304PI: Susan LeonardUniversity of MichiganDramatically falling death rates lead to increased life expectancy in the US between the late 19th century and the early 20th century. The widely accepted explanation is that deaths from infectious diseases such as smallpox and cholera were on the wane and deaths from degenerative diseases like heart disease and cancer were on the rise, but changes in the names of diseases make testing this hypothesis difficult. This study aims to develop a database that systematically standardizes the causes of death, groups deaths into categories, and provides information about the quality, reliability, and importance of standardization and classification to understanding long-term trends in death rates. The database will contain individual death records from Holyoke and Northampton, Massachusetts from 1850 to 1912 and two alternate cause of death classifications, one based on a standardization of the causes of death given in the original records and the other based on assigning deaths to the early International Classification of Causes of Death. The data will also include measurements of how reliable the classifications are, and whether classification makes a significant difference in mortality trends. BROADER IMPACTS: The database will be made available to the public in a form suitable for use by historical mortality researchers and public users for example, genealogists. With this data, researchers will be able to better understand the role of controlling infectious disease in lowering overall death rates. The methods used to create the database will also be useful for researchers working in other settings where the meaning of causes of death may be unclear.