Crude rate

Definition

The term crude rate for a particular type of demographic event refers to the ratio of the number of occurrences of that event in a year within a given population, to the total size of the population. The term crude signifies our use of the total population in the denominator, rather than a suitably chosen relevant subset of the population. Crude rates are typically scaled to be reported out of a denominator of 1000.

Particular cases

• Crude birth rate: This can be contrasted with more sophisticated measures such as general fertility rate, age-specific fertility rate, and total fertility rate.
• Crude death rate