Arbeitsbereich

Bevölkerungsdynamik und Nachhaltiges Wohlbefinden

Auf einen Blick Projekte Publikationen Team

Projekt

Methodological Advances in the Study of Socioeconomic Inequalities in Mortality (Dissertation)

Ana Cristina Gómez Ugarte Valerio, Ugofilippo Basellini, Carlo Giovanni Camarda, Fanny Janssen, Emilio Zagheni

Ausführliche Beschreibung

Socioeconomic inequalities in mortality have long captivated the attention of demographers, but their measurement remains challenging. Thus, these inequalities have previously been studied in only a few developed countries with high-quality data, where linked register data provide the means for their proper estimation. In these settings, analyses usually rely on summary measures of mortality, disregarding the vast amount of information contained in the age at the distributions. Conversely, in low-quality data contexts, researchers must rely on unlinked data sources for deaths and exposures by education level, which are subject to different types of error, including education misreporting, which can highly bias the estimation of such inequalities. These inherent problems make it difficult to conduct meaningful research in many parts of the world.

This project contributes to the measurement of socioeconomic inequalities in mortality in both high- and low-quality data contexts. For contexts with high-quality data, it illustrates how leveraging age-at-death distributions can provide novel insights into the measurement of socioeconomic inequalities in mortality. Specifically, it shows that the multi-group nonoverlap index, a measure of distributional similarity, is sensitive not only to changes in the means or variances, but also to broader mortality changes that affect distributional shapes (see the figure below for an example). For Swedish females, for example, this approach reveals that educational inequalities in mortality started to decline earlier than other measures suggest.

For countries where the data are of lower quality and unlinked cross-sectional data are the only available means of studying educational inequalities in mortality, this project provides a comprehensive evaluation of how estimates of educational inequalities in mortality can be affected by education misreporting errors. In particular, we find that education misreporting can greatly bias mortality estimates, with the direction and the magnitude of the bias influenced by the composition and inequality levels of the population. Furthermore, the project aims to adjust education-specific mortality estimates in a setting with poor data quality, using Mexican data as a case study.

The project explores socioeconomic inequalities in mortality across diverse contexts. Therefore, multiple analytical approaches are employed that range from standard demographic techniques to simulation studies. Given the central focus on socioeconomic inequalities in mortality, various measures of socioeconomic inequalities in mortality are evaluated, with a particular focus on three measures of distributional similarity: the nonoverlap index, the out-survival probability, and the stratification index.

Publikationen

Gómez Ugarte Valerio, A. C.; Basellini, U.; Camarda, C. G.; Janssen, F.:

The impact of education misreporting on education-specific mortality and educational inequalities in mortality: a scenario-based study

Population Studies, 1–17. (2026)    

Gómez Ugarte Valerio, A. C.; Basellini, U.; Camarda, C. G.; Janssen, F.; Zagheni, E.:

Reassessing socioeconomic inequalities in mortality via distributional similarities

MPIDR Working Paper WP-2024-007. (2024)