One of the most striking features of premature death in Finland is the ethno-linguistic mortality gradient in working-aged men. Finnish speakers have a notably higher mortality risk than Swedish speakers. The underlying reasons are not fully clear, but one suggested explanation has been that the level of social integration is lower in the Finnish-speaking community than that in the Swedish-speaking one, as people in the former are geographically less rooted at the local level. In this paper, we derive a proxy for the influence of the ethno-linguistic community as a contextual factor on the Finnish-Swedish mortality gradient. The strategy is based on a unique setup that makes it possible to identify people not only by their ethno-linguistic background and ethno-linguistic affiliation, but we indirectly know also in which community a person has been raised. Results of multivariate regressions provide poor support for this contextual hypothesis, however, and rather suggest that some latent individual characteristics might be important, hence illuminating the complexity behind the excess mortality of Finnish speakers.
Keywords: Ethnic communities; Ethno-linguistic groups; Premature death; Register-based data.