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Undetermined Manner of Death

A Comparison With Unintentional Injury, Suicide, and Homicide Death

University of California, Los Angeles

Haikang Shen

University of California, Los Angeles

Jess F. Kraus

University of California, Los Angeles

Injury deaths can be grouped into four general categories: accident, honucide, suicide, and undetermined. The present study investigates the use of the "undetermined" category. External cause of death, as well as demographic and other vanables, were abstracted from death certificates of the 386,936 Califomians who died of an injury between 1969 and 1991. Differ ences among the four nianner-of-death groups were examined, and characteristics of the decedent and the injury event were used to predict a classificatton of undetermined. Coroners classified 1.9% of the deaths as undetermined in manner. Deaths of women, Blacks, Asians, and Native Americans; the very young and the middle aged; or those involving poisoning or submersion were most likely to be classified as undetermined. Acknowledging that individual coroner judgment may not be free of bias, these findings can help provide a better estimate of the frequency and the epidemiologtc features of injury deaths that are assigned to the category of undetermined.

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