Name: The deliveries of the cohort members (Kohortmedlemmarnas födslar)
Period(s): 1973-1983 (SMS) Code book: V

Information
This section presents information on the female cohort members’ child deliveries during the period 1973 to 1983. The information was gathered from the medical birth register (Medicinska födelseregistret) of 1984. The medical registration of births was established in 1973 throughout the whole country and was up until 1982 based on the medical birth register.

All hospitals were to send copies of the medical birth forms to The National Board of Health and Welfare for all the newborn children, regardless of whether they were born living or deceased. The purpose of this excerption was to compare the deliveries of the cohort members (complications throughout the pregnancy, delivery and childbed, the length of the delivery, the child’s length and weight, the length of the pregnancy etc.) with corresponding information from the delivery records data from 1953 (see Codebook II).

The data file contains information on i.e. the child’s year of birth and sex, the hospital in which the child was conceived, complications during the delivery and the health state of the newborn. In total, 3,967 of the female cohort members gave birth during the given time period and delivered a total number of 6,104 children. Each delivery has its own row in the data set.
The diagnoses are presented by the application of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) International Classification of Diseases (ICD-8).

It is noteworthy to point out that that the quality of the variables in the medical birth register is quite varied. This problem is mostly due to the fact that the medical birth forms were not always filled out carefully – perhaps due to the fact that the care giving staff prioritized focusing on providing care to the patients rather than filling out forms. This has nonetheless led to the fact that the numbers of missing cases are large in certain variables. There is also a risk of incomplete diagnoses of the illnesses possessed by the children and the mother since some diagnoses are added to the forms later on in the care giving process.

References

Ericsson, A (1984), Angående utdrag över MFM för Projekt Metropolit, Unpublished, The Metropolitan Archive, vol. Kohortmedlemmarnas egna barn, Stockholm: The Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI)

Feychting, M (1984), Barn till MET-flickorna, Unpublished, The Metropolitan Archive, vol. Kohortmedlemmarnas egna barn, Stockholm: The Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI)