A community health nurse is calculating deaths among school-age children in a county. Which method should be used to obtain this data?

• A. Crude death rate
• B. Infant mortality rate
• C. Life expectancy
• D. Age-specific mortality rate

Answer: (D)

Measuring deaths in a defined age group per the population of that same age group is essential here. The school-age mortality rate uses the number of deaths among school-age children in the county as the numerator and the total number of school-age children in the county as the denominator, usually expressed per 100,000 children. This format reveals the specific mortality risk for that age group and lets you compare it across time or across counties, which is exactly what you need when focusing on deaths among school-age children. Other measures don’t fit this purpose: a crude death rate uses all ages in the total population, which can obscure age-specific risks; infant mortality rate counts only infants under one year; life expectancy summarizes expected years of life for a newborn, not a rate for a particular age group. So, the age-specific mortality rate is the appropriate method.