# Novel methods for estimating adult mortality using a survey

> **NIH NIH R21** · UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY · 2024 · $412,656

## Abstract

ABSTRACT
Accurate estimates of adult death rates are critical to good science and health policy. In most
high-income countries, adult death rates are directly calculated since civil registration systems
record every death. But in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs)--including most of Asia
and Africa–civil registration systems are weak. Estimates from high quality surveys could be a
promising source of information about adult mortality in these countries, but unfortunately,
decades of research have revealed that estimating adult death rates from a survey is extremely
challenging. A major obstacle is that current methods require many thousands of interviews per
survey. Large surveys are prohibitively expensive, and they make it difficult to innovate and
improve methods over time. As a result, there is a critical lack of evidence about adult mortality
in LMICs. This is a problem: without accurate adult death rates, researchers cannot evaluate the
impact of policies intended to confront deadly pandemics such as AIDS and COVID-19, quantify
the pace of population aging, produce population projections that inform social and economic
policy, or even directly measure life expectancy. This project will develop a new set of statistical
and data collection tools make it possible to collect information about adult mortality using
surveys with moderate sample sizes (n ≈ 1,000-2,000), thereby greatly expanding the potential
sources of data available to understand adult mortality in LMICs. Aim 1 will develop new
statistical methods, and apply them to already-collected pilot data; estimated death rates will be
compared to a gold standard, allowing for errors and accuracy to be calculated for each method.
Aim 2 will collect new qualitative data to help explain why the best-performing methods were
successful in this setting (as revealed by Aim 1); and help generate hypotheses that will form
the basis for a larger-scale, multi-site test of these methods in the future. The findings will form
the basis of a new website and support other tools for disseminating our results. The results will
produce tools that can be used to increase the amount of evidence available about adult death
rates around the world.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10953359
- **Project number:** 1R21AG088981-01
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY
- **Principal Investigator:** Dennis Michael Feehan
- **Activity code:** R21 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $412,656
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2024-09-15 → 2026-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10953359

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10953359, Novel methods for estimating adult mortality using a survey (1R21AG088981-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10953359. Licensed CC0.

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