GARLAND STUDIES ON
THE ELDERLY IN AMERICA
edited by
STUART BRUCHEY
UNIVERSITY OF MAINE
RACIAL DIFFERENCES IN LIFE EXPECTANCY AMONG ELDERLY AFRICAN AMERICANS AND WHITES
THE SURPRISING TRUTH ABOUT COMPARISONS
LAURA B. SHRESTHA
First published 1997 by Garland Publishing, Inc.
This edition first published in 2021 by Routledge
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Copyright 1997 Laura B. Shrestha
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shrestha, Laura B.
Racial differences in life expectancy among elderly African Americans and whites : the surprising truth about comparisons / Laura B. Shrestha.
p.cm. (Garland studies on the elderly in America)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8153-2764-1 (alk. paper)
1. Afro-American agedMortality. 2. AgedUnited StatesMortality. 3. Life expectancyUnited States. I. Title. II. Series.
HB1323.B5S551997
304.64508996073dc21 | 96-30016 |
ISBN 13: 978-1-03-216599-8 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-03-216746-6 (pbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-00-324980-1 (ebk)
Dedication
This book is dedicated to my family. Thank you to my mother, Helen L. Arthur, for your persistent encouragement of higher education and for your undying pride in your family. Gratitude to my husband TJ and daughters Lena (age 8) and June (age 5) Shrestha for your forbearance and sympathetic support during the writing of this book.
Contents
Results for Blacks Summary |
This book is based on a dissertation written while a student in the Population Studies Center of the University of Pennsylvania, under the guidance of Dr. Samuel H. Preston. The catalyst for the research was the recognition that major uncertainties exist about the quality of population and death data for the elderly in the United States as a result of coverage and content errors in the censuses and death registration. Furthermore, different patterns appear to exist for the two major racial groupings in the United States: whites and African-Americans.
Racial differences in life expectancy have long been observed in the United States, wherein African-American life expectancy at various ages is generally lower than that of whites. At the advanced ages, however, a reversal is observed whereby blacks have more years remaining on average than whites. Is the crossover real, reflecting some type of biological superiority for African Americans at the oldest ages, or is the phenomenon simply attributable to the poor quality of the data on which mortality statistics are calculated?
The book evaluates the consistency of reported data between the two major sources of data for calculation of mortality statistics in the United States: censuses and death registration. The focus is on the older population (aged 60 and above), where mortality trends have the greatest impact on social programs and where data quality is most problematic. Using demographic techniques, age-specific inconsistencies between the sources are evaluated for both whites and African-Americans for two periods: 19701980 and 19801990.
While the catalyst for this book was to highlight the effect of age misreporting on mortality estimates in the United States, the evaluation clearly reveals serious consequences for any research that is based on official population and vital registration data at advanced ages.
I was fortunate to have been introduced and guided in my demographic studies by a cadre of excellent instructors. First and foremost, I would like to acknowledge Dr. Samuel H. Preston, who played many roles, including dissertation adviser, mentor, classroom professor in demographic methods, and project director of the African American Mortality Project. Much of the credit for the completion of this project is directly the result of Sams intervention, through selection of the topic, to professional guidance in the use of the methodologies, and to the interpretation of the results.
I would also like to express gratitude to Dr. Irma Elo and Dr. Douglas Ewbank, members of the dissertation committee for this project. The final product was significantly improved by their substantive contributions and through their meticulous attention to detail.
Many other people contributed to this project. Special thanks to Tania Bissell and to Kristi Long of Garland Publishing for their excellent editing skills and for their patience support in helping me to complete the manuscript on a reasonable time schedule.
Racial Differences in Life Expectancy among Elderly African Americans and Whites
The focus of this book is to evaluate and improve estimates of race-, sex-, and age-specific census enumerations and death registration for the elderly United States population over the period 1970 to 1990. Directly calculated estimates at very high ages are known to be untrustworthy due to conspicuous inconsistencies that result from coverage errors in the census enumerations, possible incompleteness of the death registration, and, especially, characteristic (age, race, etc.) misstatement in vital statistics and in censuses. While the magnitude and direction of the errors have been the subjects of much speculation in the professional literature, little research has been conducted to evaluate and improve age data in the primary data sources. Therefore, the central focus in this book will be on evaluation of age misreporting, which preliminary analysis suggests is the dominant contributor to data inconsistencies in the U.S. populations.
Age misreporting refers to the intentional or inadvertent introduction of errors into reported age data. Various sources of error exist. An interviewed person may not be able to provide real ages for himself and for other household members due to ignorance of exact age or because of a wish to intentionally distort the truth. For instance, a person currently receiving payments through entitlement programs based on an incorrect age could be expected to continue to report the incorrect age. Shryock and Siegel (1976) further describe a notable tendency to report an age over 100 for persons of very advanced age stemming from a desire to share in the esteem generally accorded extreme old age or from gross ignorance of the true age. Although likely to affect only small numbers because of the self-reporting of characteristics in the U.S. censuses, the
