Direct Standardization

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.