The transfer of copies of vital event records into a government archives repository is necessary not only to ensure their ongoing preservation, but also to provide access and accessibility to them for all researchers in an appropriate setting. At present all vital event records gatekeepers in Canada, except two, do not have in place a system providing for such regular transferral. The central reason for this lack of process is the assumption that vital event records are somehow different in kind, and not just in type, from other public records that contain personal information. This thesis evaluates that assumption through an analysis of the history of vital statistics legislation and a comparative study of the privacy regime of that legislation with the legislative regime of access to information and privacy. Having done these two studies, the thesis then recommends a way in which legal transfer from the gatekeepers to the repository can be achieved. That recommendation is, first, that all discussion regarding access must be accomplished before their acquisition. Secondly, their acquisition and accessibility must be based upon the expiration of time—limits. / Arts, Faculty of / Library, Archival and Information Studies (SLAIS), School of / Graduate

Multivariate statistical methods, including recent computing-intensive techniques, are explained and applied in a medical sociology context to study infant death in relation to socioeconomic risk factors of households in Sri Lankan villages. The data analyzed were collected by a team of social scientists who interviewed households in Sri Lanka during 1980-81. Researchers would like to identify characteristics (risk factors) distinguishing those households at relatively high or low risk of experiencing an infant death. Furthermore, they would like to model temporal and structural relationships among important risk factors. Similar statistical issues and analyses are relevant to many sociological and epidemiological studies. Results from such studies may be useful to health promotion or preventive medicine program planning. With respect to an outcome such as infant death, risk groups and discriminating factors or variables can be identified using a variety of statistical discriminant methods, including Fisher's parametric (normal) linear discriminant, logistic linear discrimination, and recursive partitioning (CART). The usefulness of a particular discriminant methodology may depend on distributional properties of the data (whether the variables are dichotomous, ordinal, normal, etc.,) and also on the context and objectives of the analysis. There are at least three conceptual approaches to statistical studies of risk factors. An epidemiological perspective uses the notion of relative risk. A second approach, generally referred to as classification or discriminant analysis, is to predict a dichotomous outcome, or class membership. A third approach is to estimate the probability of each outcome, or of belonging to each class. These three approaches are discussed and compared; and appropriate methods are applied to the Sri Lankan household data. Path analysis is a standard method used to investigate causal relationships among variables in the social sciences. However, the normal multiple regression assumptions under which this method is developed are very restrictive. In this thesis, limitations of path analysis are explored, and alternative loglinear techniques are considered. / Science, Faculty of / Statistics, Department of / Graduate

This research estimates the life expectancy of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) in Utah. We create gender-specific life tables for four groups: total Utah, active LDS, less-active LDS, and non-LDS. Male life tables are based on data from 1991-1995; female life tables are based on data from 1994-1998. Life expectancy at birth is 75 years for all utah males, 79.8 years for active LDS Utah males, 71.6 years for less active LDS Utah males, and 71.5 years for non-LDS Utah males. Female life expectancy at birth is 80.4 years for all Utah females, 83.9 years for active LDS Utah females, 77.7 years for less-active LDS Utah females, and 77.4 years for non-LDS utah females. Results from this research can be useful to health policy makers and in the allocation of health resources. If it is indeed true that a large portion of the life expectancy gains in the active LDS group is attributable to adherence to a health code, then this information can be used when designing and evaluating health intervention programs.

The objective of the study was to identify the factors that affect the survival lifetime of HIV+ terminal patients in rural district hospitals of Albert Luthuli municipality in the Mpumalanga province of South Africa. A cohort of HIV+ terminal patients was retrospectively followed from 2010 to 2017 until a patient died, was lost to follow-up or was still alive at the end of the observation period. Nonparametric survival analysis and semiparametric survival analysis methods were used to analyse the data. Through Cox proportional hazards regression modelling, it was found that ART adherence (poor, fair, good), Age, Follow-up mass, Baseline sodium, Baseline viral load, Follow CD4 count by Treatment (Regimen 1) interaction and Follow-up lymphocyte by TB history (yes, no) interaction had significant effects on survival lifetime of HIV+ terminal patients (p-values<0.1). Furthermore, through quantile regression modelling, it was found that short, medium and long survival times of HIV+ patients, respectively represented by the 0.1, 0.5 and 0.9 quantiles, were not necessarily significantly affected by the same factors. / Statistics / M. Sc. (Statistics)