An assessment of methods for estimating adult mortality from two sets of data on maternal orphanhood.

The article focuses on the assessment of methods for adult mortality and maternal orphanhood. This paper concentrates on a number of procedures suggested recently for combining two independently collected sets of orphanhood data for the same country to yield a single set of adult mortality estimates referring to the intervening period. adult female mortality from data on maternal orphanhood. The two surveys of the same population have been conducted five years apart, the proportion of respondents whose mother is alive in each five-year age group according to the first survey can be compared with the equivalent proportion for respondents five years older, five years later. Assuming that the mortality and migration of respondents is not related to the mortality of their mothers, the ratio of each pair of proportions reflects the mothers' mortality during the inter survey period. This represents the values the proportions would take for a synthetic birth cohort if their mothers were exposed to constant mortality rates equal to the average of those in effect during the inter survey period.