Abstract
Studies conducted in historical populations and developing countries have evidenced the existence of clustering in infant deaths, which could be related to genetic inheritance and/or to social and cultural factors such as education, socioeconomic status or parental care. A transmission of death clustering has also been found across generations. One way of expanding the knowledge on intergenerational transfers in infant mortality is by conducting comparable studies across different populations. The Intermediate Data Structure (IDS) was developed as a strategy aimed at simplifying the collecting, storing and sharing of historical demographic data. The current work presents two programs that were developed in STATA to construct a dataset for analysis and run statistical models to study intergenerational transfers in infant mortality using databases that are stored in the IDS. The programs use information stored in the IDS tables and after elaborating such information produce Excel files with results. They can be used with any longitudinal database constructed from church books, civil registers, or population registers.
Highlights
Previous research has shown the existence of infant mortality clustering within certain families (Das Gupta, 1990; Edvinsson, Brändström, Rogers, & Broström, 2005; Janssens, Messelink, & Need, 2010; Vandezande, 2012), possibly resulting from genetic inheritance and social and cultural factors related to education, socioeconomic status or parental care (Janssens et al, 2010)
The first program presented in this work (Figure 1) creates a dataset for analysing intergenerational transmissions in infant mortality along the maternal line, using as source information data stored in the Intermediate Data Structure (IDS) format in the INDIVIDUAL and INDIV_INDIV tables
The current article presented two programs written for STATA, which allow studying whether the likelihood of death in infancy is influenced by the number of infant deaths experienced by the maternal grandmother
Summary
Previous research has shown the existence of infant mortality clustering within certain families (Das Gupta, 1990; Edvinsson, Brändström, Rogers, & Broström, 2005; Janssens, Messelink, & Need, 2010; Vandezande, 2012), possibly resulting from genetic inheritance and social and cultural factors related to education, socioeconomic status or parental care (Janssens et al, 2010). The first program developed for this project, the “Dataset creator”, elaborates basic information stored in the IDS tables to produce variables and create the dataset for analysis. The CHRONICLE FILE contains all the variables selected for analysis, which can be a combination of individual or context level time-varying variables, time-invariant variables and events stored in the IDS and the EIDS tables or created by extraction programs from IDS data and added directly. The first program presented in this work (Figure 1) creates a dataset for analysing intergenerational transmissions in infant mortality along the maternal line, using as source information data stored in the IDS format in the INDIVIDUAL and INDIV_INDIV tables. It gives as output a CHRONICLE FILE and a VARIABLE SETUP FILE (Quaranta, 2015), and at the end they are transformed into an episodes table for statistical analysis using the “Episodes file creator.”
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