Constructing Life Table

On 30 September 2014, BPS held seminar titled ‘To Explain the Life Table Contruction Methods and Results. It was attending by a number of researchers and representatives from Bappenas, LDUI, FKMUI, and BKKBN. The seminar was officially opened by the Deputy Chief Statistician for Social Affairs Wynandin Imawan and moderated by the Director of Population and Employment Statistics Razali Ritonga.

The conversation below is Varia Statistik teams’s interview with Razali Ritonga speaking about the life table.

What is life table?

Life Table is a table that contains about mortality data by age which useful to calculate various demographic parameters, such as life expectancy, crude death rate, crude birth rate, and the probability at birth of reaching the age of 40 years.

What is the background of life table?

There are two basic reasons why life table needs to be constructed. The first is to meet the recommendation from the United Nations, that every country should have its own life table. The fact is Indonesia has not had a life table so far. The second is that life table is one of the outputs of the Population Census. We have population census, so we must create a life table. It will be vey helpful for us if we develop the life table by type such as by disease, new entry of labor, and age of marriage. 

What is the challenge in constructing life table?

Main challenge in constructing the life table is quality of the data. Under-reported death is the main cause distorting the quality of mortality data. Reporting death is often considered a disgrace or misfortune. So, this phenomenon results in lower death rate. Another challenge is that mortality data are collected from information from other people. This also causes under-reported data. Ideally, the data used in the life table are from resident or civil registration, but unfortunately until now we have not had a complete registration. The solution to these challenges is to improve coverage of the SP2010 results by using particular models that can portrait this matter very well.

What is the current progess of the life table construction?

Life table has been completed, but the quality is still disputed. In terms of stages, they all are already completed and delivered. However, it needs some improvement in order to be able to be used by users. The life table construction is funded by the UNFPA.

What is BPS expectation for this life table?

The life table is very important, so we are now trying to transfer the life table calculation knowledge to the region offices. Funding for capacity building is expected in doing so. Region offices must have the ability to calculate their own life table because they themselves know directly the field conditions.