Uses of Vital Statistics

Uses of Vital Statistics – In various countries, vital statistics systems were developed not by chance but as a result of the necessity for records and statistics. Vital Statistics are extremely helpful, and their importance can be assessed from the following perspectives:

1. Use to Individuals
2. Use to operating agencies
3. Use in research – demographic and medical
4. Use in public administration
5. International use of vital statistics

1. Use to Individuals –

Records of births, deaths marriages, and divorces as well as those of legitimation, recognition, adoption, and so forth, are of paramount use to the individuals. The basic registration document or a certified copy thereof has legal significance to the person concerned, which is equaled by a few of the other documents a man may acquire in his lifetime.

2. Use to Operating Agencies –

Records of birth, deaths, and marriages are useful to governmental agencies for a variety of administrative purposes. For example, the control programs for infectious diseases within the family and within the community often depend on the death registration report for their initiation. Public Health programs of post-natal care for the mother and child usually have their starting point to the birth register and the corresponding birth indices, public safety, accident prevention, and crime eradication programs make use of the death registration records.

3. Use in Research – Demographic and Medical

Vital Statistics are indispensable in demographic research. The study of population movement and of the interrelationships of demographic with economic and social factors is of fundamental importance to society and will become increasingly more so as the advance in technology and public health focus attention on demographic problems.

The three directions which such an analysis takes are :
(i) population estimation, (ii) population projection, and (iii) analytical studies.

Very closely allied to the role of vital Statistics in demographic research is their use by the medical professionals engaged in research. Medical and pharmaceutical research, like demographic research, requires a certain number of guideposts. This guidance may be found in part at least in mortality and the natality statistics.

Read Also – Data Classification and Tabulation

4. Use in Public Administration

Statistics in general and vital statistics in particular are fundamental elements in public administration, which is the machinery and methods underlying all official programs of economic and social development in either ‘developed, or ‘under-developed’ areas. The role of vital statistics in the overall planning and evaluation of economic and social development is the most important use to which this body of data may be placed.

5. International Use of Vital Statistics

Vital Statistics are also useful from an international viewpoint. Only by a sufficiently wide survey of human facts can the required norms of all sorts be established, norms which represent the character of the great unit constituted by the aggregation of all the nations.

However, it should be noted that vital statistics, like all statistics and multiple vital records, are not ends in themselves but tools for the study and understanding of other phenomena. The utilization of vital statistics as administrative and research tools stimulated both demographic research and public health planning, with the consequent reciprocal effect on statistics of births and deaths and, to a lesser degree, on those of marriage.

(Source – Various Books from College Library including “Studies in Methods, Series FNo.7, Handbook of Vital Statistics Methods”)

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