Compare methods

	Kitagawa Decomposition	Direct Standardization
Field	Demography	Demography
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1955	2001
Originator	Evelyn M. Kitagawa	Classical demographic method (formalized by Preston, Heuveline & Guillot)
Type	Arithmetic decomposition of a difference between two summary rates	Rate adjustment by reweighting to a standard population
Seminal source	Kitagawa, E. M. (1955). Components of a difference between two rates. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 50(272), 1168–1194.	Preston, S. H., Heuveline, P., & Guillot, M. (2001). Demography: Measuring and Modeling Population Processes. Blackwell. ISBN: 9781557864512
Aliases	Components-of-difference method, Rate decomposition, Standardization decomposition, Kitagawa Ayrıştırması	Directly standardized rate, Age-standardized rate, Direct method of standardization, Doğrudan Standardizasyon
Related	4	4
Summary	Kitagawa decomposition is a demographic technique that splits the difference between two summary rates — such as two crude death rates, birth rates, or prevalence figures — into the part attributable to differences in the underlying group-specific rates and the part attributable to differences in population composition. Introduced by Evelyn Kitagawa in 1955, it answers whether a gap between two populations reflects genuinely different risks or merely a different age (or other) structure.	Direct standardization is a demographic technique that makes summary rates comparable across populations by applying each population's group-specific rates — most often age-specific death or disease rates — to a single, common standard population structure. The resulting directly standardized rate answers a counterfactual question: what would the crude rate be if every population had the same age (or other) composition? It removes the confounding effect of differing population structure so that genuine differences in underlying risk can be compared on a level footing.