Home > Statistics > Deaths > Concepts and definitions

Concepts and definitions

Age

In connection with vital events, age data refer to the age on the day the event took place. Average age is obtained by adding up the ages of all persons involved in the same event at the time of the event, after which the sum is divided by the number of these persons. As the used age of a person is given in full years at the time of the event, it is not the exact age of that person. For this reason, it is assumed when computing average age that the persons were aged x+0.5, on average, at the time of the event.

Age-specific death rate

The age-specific death rate refers to the number of deaths per 1,000 of the mean population in the age group in question.

Deaths

Persons permanently resident in Finland on the day of their death are recorded in the statistics as deaths. Data on deaths are obtained from the Digital and Population Data Services Agency’s Population Information System. The number of deaths may differ somewhat from each other in different statistics. The difference is due to the different compilation times of the statistics. The official number of deaths in Finland is derived from the deaths in the population statistics.

General death rate

General death rate indicates the number of deaths per 1,000 or 100,000 persons of the mean population.

Increase of population

Increase of population is the sum of excess of births over deaths and net immigration.

Infant mortality

Infant mortality is calculated by dividing the number of deaths of infants under one year of age by the number of live births during the statistical year. Multiplying the result by 1,000 gives the figure in per mille.

Language

Information on language is obtained from the Population Information System. At the same time as parents register the name of their new-born, they also indicate the child's mother tongue. That language is retained in the Population Information System unless it is changed upon separate application.

Languages are classified by the Population Register Centre according to the ISO 639 standard. The future language classification ISO-639-1 was already adopted for the 2000 population census.

Life expectancy

The number of years that a person of a given age would live provided that the rate of mortality remains unchanged.

Perinatal mortality

Perinatal mortality refers to the number of stillbirths and those who died in their first week of life per 1,000 births.

Probability of death

The probability of death at some age x refers to the probability of a person living until the age of x to die during that year of age.

Sex

The information about sex has been obtained from the Population Information System.