Death Certificate

The death certificate is a document by which death is legally recognized. Permanently filed with [Page 313]the state or district health department, the death certificate is a legal source of information that contributes to the needs of society that continues in function and structure after the individual is dead. The death certificate represents one of the officially reported documents surrounding an individual's life or, more significantly, death. This document includes a variety of information, the most important of which are the cause and circumstances of death, information that is used by public health analysts, government officials, and private business interests to estimate population growth, delineate health problems and assess health progress and program planning needs, and study the history of disease.

Like birth, marriage, and divorce, death is a social event that is celebrated through rituals and institutionalized through documentation. Death entails a legal process of registration that generates an important by-product, namely vital mortality statistics that provide the data essential to the construction of death rates, such as crude death rate, age-specific death rates, and the age-adjusted death rate. The creation of life tables to determine life expectancy among a stationary living population also is possible using accumulated death registry data. Such information allows for the study of sociodemographic correlates of multiple causes of death as well as more basic comparisons of death rates by age, sex, race, marital status, occupation, and level of education.

The death certificate provides information that is useful to population forecasting, adding to our knowledge of life expectancy, and provides information essential to those interested in genealogical study. As a historical document that recounts significant portions of an individual's life, it thus adds to the history of a community. One critical component of the certificate of death is that of medical certification. Other aspects of this document inform us of the overall ethnic and racial composition of a population, the levels of education, how people respond to the need to provide specimens for scientific study or the donation of organs, and the level of acceptance of nontraditional methods of body disposal such as cremation. Although less direct, an indication of movement patterns of the population also can be suggested from information recorded on this document. Finally, if certified by a medical examiner, information and testimony relating to this document can be used in criminal and civil courts of law.

Evolution of Death Registration

The term statistics is derived from the Latin phrase ratio status and the Italian equivalent ragione di stato. Initially employed in the study of practical politics, the concept has undergone transformation from its original 17th- and 18th-century meaning and application to understanding the political science of European nation-states. Influenced by the statistician Quetelet during the early 1800s, the numerical element of a two-part conceptualization of statistics later began to take root, and it is this numerical component that came to dominate definitions of the term as it is currently used to mean the numerical study of social groups.

Vital statistics represent important events and are recorded at the time of birth, marriage, divorce, and death. Parochial registration of baptisms and burials were recorded as early as 1538, and the initial numerical scientific study of death records, authored by John Gaunt in 1662, is based on these data. Gaunt's categories included causes of death—a recording of vital information as a part of the evolving system of registration, which was to have, in the words of Edwin Shneidman, “great social and medical significance.”

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