SPARC: Mortality Rates by Birthplace

In this first application of SPARC, users can calculate age-adjusted mortality rates for U.S.-born and foreign-born Americans. Users can display the calculated rates according to the following characteristics:

  • Single year of death or multiple years of deaths from 2006 to 2018
  • State of death
  • Cause of death coded by ICD-10 mortality coding classification
  • Stratified by age, sex, and bridged single race/ethnicity*
  • Standard output will include:
    • Death counts
    • Population estimates and standard errors of the population estimates
    • Bias-corrected age-adjusted rates and standard errors of bias-corrected age-adjusted rates
    • 95% confidence intervals of bias-corrected age-adjusted rates
    • Bias-corrected Rate Ratio and its corresponding 95% confidence intervals
    • Rate Difference, i.e., arithmetic difference, between two bias-corrected age-adjusted rates, and its corresponding standard error
  • Optional output will include age-adjusted rates calculated without correcting for sampling errors, plus the corresponding standard errors.

Data Sources

This first application of SPARC includes the following datasets for calculating mortality rates:

  • Mortality Data (Numerator): Total U.S. mortality data for 2006-2018 collected and maintained by the National Center for Health Statistics of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This database includes the bridged-race data.
  • Population Estimates (Denominator): Annual state-level populations for 2006-2018 estimated from the American Community Survey samples by the National Cancer Institute. For details, refer to the FAQ “How are population estimates and standard errors calculated?”

Select Database

Three mortality databases with different year and geographic coverage are available for analyzing mortality rates by birthplace and trends of mortality rates by birthplace. The first two databases produce national rates: one for a relatively short timeframe (2010-2018) and another for a long-term timeframe (2006-2018), with data from the state of Georgia excluded due to incomplete birthplace data in 2008 and 2009. A third database provides options to calculate mortality rates and trends of rates for individual states by death-year group from 2006 to 2018.

*Bridged single race/ethnicity is limited to Non-Hispanic White, Non-Hispanic Black, Non-Hispanic Asian/Pacific Islander, and Hispanic. Denominators for Hispanic by detailed bridged single race and Non-Hispanic American Indian/Alaska Native are not stable for use in calculating age-adjusted rates due to ACS sample size constraints. Bridged single race is identified as “RACESING” variable in University of Minnesota’s Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS)-USA (https://usa.ipums.org/usa-action/variables/RACESING#description_sectionExternal Website Policy). For more details about the bridged single race, refer to Liebler (2022)External Website Policy.

Liebler CA. Building New Bridges: Developing and Disseminating a Simplified Race/Ethnicity Measure for Working with Complex or Contradictory Race Data. University of Minnesota, Minnesota Population Center, IPUMS Working Paper No. 2022-02. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18128/MPC2022-02External Website Policy.