Intentions and realities in rehabilitation service in Denmark.

We used Danish register data on rehabilitation benefits paid from 1994 to 2005. The purpose was to compare actual payments of rehabilitation benefits with intentions in the law. Legally, rehabilitation benefits should be used for providing living expenses during a planned rehabilitation period facilitating the recipients' return to the labor market. We found that one third of recipients were paid for less than 3 months, and half of remaining recipients had time gaps in their payments. The findings indicated that rehabilitation benefits were not paid only for planned rehabilitation periods, and that not all recipients followed the legally required plan.

Data on education: from population statistics to epidemiological research.

BACKGROUND: Level of education is in many fields of research used as an indicator of social status. METHODS: Using Statistics Denmark's register for education and employment of the population, we examined highest completed education with a birth-cohort perspective focusing on people born between 1930 and 1974. RESULTS: Irregularities in the educational data were found for both men and women born from 1951 to 1957. For the birth cohorts born from 1951 to 1954, a sudden increase in the proportion of persons with basic school education only was seen, and a following decrease in this proportion was seen for the birth cohorts born from 1955 to 1957. For the same birth cohorts, a reverse curve was found for the proportion with vocational training as highest completed education. Using proportion of women with at least one child at the age of 30, our analysis illustrated that spurious patterns may emerge when other social phenomena are analysed by partly misclassified educational groups. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings showed that register data are not always to be taken at face value and that thorough analysis may unravel unexpected irregularities. Although such data errors may be remedied in analyses of population trends by use of extrapolated values, solutions are less obvious in epidemiological research using individual level data.