© 2006 American Public Health Association DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2006.094789
The authors are with the Department of Population, Family, and Reproductive Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Md. Correspondence: Requests for reprints should be sent to Ashley Schempf, BS, Department of Population, Family, and Reproductive Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 615 N Wolfe St, Baltimore, MD 21205 (e-mail: aschempf@jhsph.edu).
Yang et al.1 applied an underutilized demographic technique, developed by Kitagawa,2 to decompose temporal trends in low birth-weight (LBW) into changes in the distribution of maternal age and parity versus changes in the age- and parity-specific rates of LBW. The authors concluded that temporal increases in LBW were largely the result of changes in age- and parity-specific rates rather than ageparity distributional shifts. The applied method, which elegantly partitions the difference between 2 aggregate rates into differences in factor-specific rates and differences in factor distribution, requires a population standard to which differences in factor-specific rates and proportions are weighted. Although This article has been cited by other articles:
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