TY - JOUR
T1 - Infant mortality in a Mexican-American community
T2 - Laredo, Texas, 1950-1977.
AU - Buchanan, A.
AU - Weiss, K. M.
N1 - Funding Information:
The analysis in this paper has been ac complished with financial support from the National Science Foundation, Grant BNS 8611338. The Laredo genealogical data base was originally assembled with support from the National Cancer Institute, Grant CA 19311, and the National Institute on Aging, AG 01028. We thank Henry Har-pending, Renee Pennington, and James Wood fortheir comments onanearlier version of this paper. We would like to acknowledge with thanks the enthusiastic support of the church and civil officials in Laredo, and of the President and Director of Medical Records at Laredo's Mercy Hospital.
PY - 1991
Y1 - 1991
N2 - Published infant mortality rates (IMR's) for Mexican-American populations frequently are lower than expected given the socioeconomic status (SES) of these populations. It has been speculated that this is due to bias or incompleteness in Mexican-American vital statistics. In this paper an extensive genealogical data base constructed from Catholic church records and civil records for the border city of Laredo, Texas is used to study this problem. The infant mortality probabilities (IMP's) since 1950 are compared to conventional IMR's, both based strictly on the population at risk defined by baptisms, in which the deaths are a proper subset of the denominator, and these are compared with IMR's calculated in the usual way from aggregate civil records of births and infant deaths for Laredo. We find that when these data are used, the IMR's for the most recent years are about twice the conventional rates computed from registered vital statistics.
AB - Published infant mortality rates (IMR's) for Mexican-American populations frequently are lower than expected given the socioeconomic status (SES) of these populations. It has been speculated that this is due to bias or incompleteness in Mexican-American vital statistics. In this paper an extensive genealogical data base constructed from Catholic church records and civil records for the border city of Laredo, Texas is used to study this problem. The infant mortality probabilities (IMP's) since 1950 are compared to conventional IMR's, both based strictly on the population at risk defined by baptisms, in which the deaths are a proper subset of the denominator, and these are compared with IMR's calculated in the usual way from aggregate civil records of births and infant deaths for Laredo. We find that when these data are used, the IMR's for the most recent years are about twice the conventional rates computed from registered vital statistics.
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U2 - 10.1080/19485565.1991.9988790
DO - 10.1080/19485565.1991.9988790
M3 - Article
C2 - 1801203
AN - SCOPUS:0026214286
SN - 1948-5565
VL - 38
SP - 233
EP - 241
JO - Biodemography and Social Biology
JF - Biodemography and Social Biology
IS - 3-4
ER -
