Abstract

This study was conducted to evaluate the accuracy of the official death registry in rural area. The base data used for the study was 379 deaths registered during the period of 1993 and 1994 in 4 rural townships of Chonnam Province. The interview survey for cause-of-death was performed on the next of kin and/or neighbor. Additional medical informations were collected from hospitals and medical insurance associations for the purpose of verification. The underlying cause-of-death of 278 cases presumed by the survey was compared to the cause on official death registry. There was a prominent disagreement of cause-of-death between the survey data and the registry data(agreement rate: 38.9~44.6%%, according to disease classification method). These results may be caused by extremely low rates of physicians' certification, which were mostly confined to the poisoning and injury. Symptoms, signs, and ill defined conditions on death registry could be classified into circulatory disease(32.3%), neoplasm(21.2%), digestive disease(7.l%), injury and poisoning(7.l%) and so on. These results suggest that careful attention and verification be required on utilization of death registry data in rural area.

• Keywords: cause of deathagreementvaliditydeath registry