The Rise: Demographics

The Rise: Demographics

Note: this is part of the Youth Suicide Rise project.

Summary: Demographic shifts related to age, sex, race, ethnicity, region, and rural areas during The Rise do not explain any part of the increase in child suicides.

Let us now recapitulate some of the information we learned from the data regarding demographic shifts during The Rise (2007-2018):

• Child population slightly decreased (by 0.8% from 74,019,405 to 73,399,342)
• Thus suicide rate increased slightly more than suicide count
• Teenage (higher rates) portion of child population slightly decreased (from 29.5% to 28.4%)
• The mean age of a child decreased slightly (from 8.67 to 8.62)
• Thus the age-adjusted rate increased more than the crude rate

• Child suicide count increased 119%, rate 121%, age-adjusted rate 131%

• Male (higher rates) share of child population decreased slightly (from 51.18% to 51.08%)
• White (higher rates) share of child population decreased (from 76.7% to 74.9%)
• Hispanic (lower rates) share of child population increased (from 21.5% to 25.2%)
• Asian (low rates) population increased more than Native (high rates) population
• NE (low rates) and MW (high rates) decreased decreased, South (lower rates) increased
• This regional shifts 'cancelled' each other in relation to child suicide
• Rural (higher rates) population decreased

• Therefore basic demographic shifts did not elevate child suicide

Notes:

This is an example of a 'module' that collects information from previous analysis into a thematic unit.

Ideally, such modules would be linked to both the data and calculations, but there are technical reasons I have delayed this -- in the meantime here are at last the most basic numbers:

Demographic	Year 2007	Year 2018	Difference	%Difference
Child Population	74019405	73399342	-620063	-0.84%
Suicide Deaths	838	1834	996	118.85%
Suicide Rate per Million	11.32	24.99	13.67	120.70%
Age-Adjusted Rate	10.58	24.41	13.83	130.72%
Teenage Children (13-17)	21804620	20837856	-966764	-4.43%
Teenage Share of Child Population	29.46%	28.39%	-0.01	-3.63%
Boys	37883878	37490849	-393029	-1.04%
Male share of child population	51.18%	51.08%	0	-0.20%
Girls	36135527	35908493	-227034	-0.63%
Female share of child population	48.82%	48.92%	0	0.21%
White	56733488	54980335	-1753153	-3.09%
White share of child population	76.65%	74.91%	-0.02	-2.27%
Hispanic	15886708	18701184	2814476	17.72%
Hispanic share	21.46%	25.27%	0.04	17.72%

Technical notes:

The age-adjusted rates are based on presuming all child age cohorts equal in population.  This is different from the CDC approach, which uses a base year such as 2000 to compute the rates.  The reason CDC does this is old people -- it makes no sense to treat the 99-year-old cohort as being the same size as the 39-year-old cohort.  Our approach is, however, sensible for youth populations as long as child mortality rates are negligible (and offset by immigration).

The reasons I am delaying detailed calculations is that the data I have is in the form of disparate collections based on different population units -- not on single suicide cases.  In theory, one could try to unify these by obtaining 'atomic' population groups that are not possible to reduce further with the current CDC info, such as:

14-year-old male White Hispanic Northeast rural firearm suicide in 2012

but it turns out this would take countless downloads using the WISQARS tool.

Instead I will eventually attempt to obtain data from CDC at individual level and then redo everything in the statistical language R with scripts so that the calculations are easy to post online and thus be available for scrutiny by anyone.