Mortality Detail Files, 1968-1991 [Reformatted Data]

This data collection describes every death or fetal death registered per year in the United States from 1968-1991. Information includes the month and day of death for deaths prior to 1989 and the month of death for deaths in 1989 and after, the sex of the deceased, the age of the deceased at the time of death, the deceased's place of residence, place of death, and whether an autopsy was performed. Causes of death are coded using the eighth and ninth revisions of The International Classification of Diseases. The Mortality Detail File data is the source file used by the NCHS for the data reported annually in the Vital Statistics of the United States, Vol.II - Mortality. The original data files were collected and prepared by the National Center for Health Statistics and distributed by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. Over the years, the number and location of variables and file formats of the original machine-readable data files changed. The SSDC data collection files have been reformatted by Dr. David Phillips and Todd E. Ruth, Department of Sociology, University of California, San Diego so that variable locations and file formats are standardized for all years of data.