Question

What are the advantages and disadvantages of crude and adjusted rates?

b. What types of information are found by using specific rates instead of crude rates?

Answer 1

Crude rate—An advantage of a crude rate is that it permits comparisons of populations that differ in size. crude death rate, which approximates the proportion of a population that dies during a time period of interest and can be used to compare populations that differ in size, because the standard of comparison is the unit size of populations.The disadvantage of a crude rate is that it has not been modified to take account of any of the factors such as the demographic makeup of the population.
b. Adjusted rate—The advantage of an adjusted rate is that it facilitates comparisons of populations that differ in demographic characteristics such as age. One disadvantage of adjusted rates is that calculation of age-adjusted rates is a much more involved procedure than that required for crude rates. Adjusted rates is to permit fair comparisons across populations by removing the effect of differences in age other demographic characteristics.

Specific rates is associated with mortality or disease frequency during any observation period of a specific population can be found using cause-specific rates.