Race/Ethnic Disparities in Cause-Specific Infant Mortality Change over Two Decades

Parker Frisbie, University of Texas at Austin
Seung-Eun Song, University of Texas at Austin

It has been argued that “the past two decades have witnessed the most profound alterations ever recorded in the structure of infant mortality patterns in the United States” (Gortmaker and Wise 1997: 152). But despite the fact that race/ethnic disparities have increased during a time period when infant mortality was falling for virtually all groups, no research exists that examines changes in cause-specific infant mortality by race/ethnicity over this crucial time period. Here we document and model black-white change in infant mortality for 1983-2001 using the NCHS linked files. We also use data for the 10 states (including all four border states) that included Hispanic identifiers throughout this time period to carry out an analysis paralleling the one just mentioned. Preliminary results indicate substantial variation in race/ethnic changes in cause-specific infant mortality and identify several important inflection points in the trends.