The Nationwide Gender Differences in the Causes of Death

Abstract

The purpose of the present research study was to evaluate the nationwide gender differences in the causes of death, by comparatively analyzing the mortality reports of the year 2010, which were obtained from the database of the Center for Disease Control. Therefore, for this purpose, the researchers hypothesized that on the national level, the causes of death for males are different as compared to the causes of death for females, across the four regions. On the other hand, the null hypothesis of the study was that on the national level, the causes of death for males are not different as compared to the causes of death for females. For the process of data collection, various reports which reported the causes of death of male and female participants who belonged to four different geographic regions, including; North, South, Midwest and West were selected based on the technique of simple random sampling and were then analyzed using the appropriate tests of statistical analysis, which in this case was, the independent sample t - test. The results obtained from the data analysis indicated that, in general, the causes of death do differ significantly among the two genders across the four mentioned geographic regions.

The Nationwide Gender Differences in the Causes of Death

Introduction

Research on gender difference in health in a wide range of countries has brought an important paradox to the public interest: females use more health services while they report worse self-rated health as compared to males, however, females are less likely to die as compared to the men of their same age all through their life, which indicates that they females, in general, tend to be healthier (National Center for Health Statistics, 2008).

The aim of this study was to evaluate the nationwide gender differences in the causes of death, by comparatively analyzing the mortality reports of the year 2010, which were obtained from the database of the Center for Disease Control. For this analysis it was hypothesized that on the national level, the causes of death for males are different as compared to the causes for females. Therefore, on the other hand, the null hypothesis of the study was that on the national level, the causes of death for males are not different as compared to the causes for females. The research question of this study is an interesting, and an important aspect to examine as it confirms and investigates the reasons behind these gender differences, which can provide a better insight to these statistics (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2004).

Literature Review

The paradox that females use more health services while they report worse self-rated health as compared to males, however, females are less likely to die as compared to the men of their same age all through their life has been the subject of earlier articles, starting with the work done by Nathanson, which was then followed by numerous others (Feldman, Makuc, Kleinman & Cornoni - Huntley, 2009).There are several possible explanations for the ...