Data Collection, Data Quality and the History of Cause-of-Death Classification

Abstract

Until 1996, when INED published its work on trends in causes of death in Russia (Meslé et al. 1996), there had been no overall study of cause-specific mortality for the Soviet Union as a whole or for any of its constituent republics. Yet at least since the 1920s, all the republics had had a modern system for registering causes of death, and the information gathered had been subject to routine statistical use at least since the 1950s. The first reason for the gap in the literature was of course that, before perestroika, these data were not published systematically and, from 1974, had even been kept secret. A second reason was probably that researchers were often questioning the data quality; however, no serious study has ever proved this. On the contrary, it seems to us that all these data offer a very rich resource for anyone attempting to track and understand cause-specific mortality trends in the countries of the former USSR – in our case, in Ukraine. Even so, a great deal of effort was required to trace, collect and computerize the various archived data deposits.