Finnish mortality in the eighteenth century: A reply

Abstract

In SEHR No.2, 1978, Eino ]utikkala took issue on a number of points with my article published in SEHR No.2, 1977, and I should like to make several comments in reply, Firstly, I have found it misleading to call the results of my data adjustments as ‘correction coefficients’. This term tends to suggest that my corrections produce precise results, an impression which the caveats explicitly stated in my text were designed to prevent. My purpose was to provide a rough suggestion of, and an approximation to the extent of errors, since it would have profited no one had I concluded the study with the simple acknowledgment of gaps in the registers and the admission that there is no way of determining their extent. Because this type of research is still relatively new, and because there seemed to be no other way of assessing the number of infants who died below one year of age, but were omitted from the registers of ‘baptised’ and ‘buried’, the national figures were used for the corrections, and an attempt was made to ensure that this approach did not lead to an overestimation of error.