Scientific Presentations
LabTalks@DCD
Department of Digital and Computational Demography
Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), Rostock, Germany, June 25, 2025
11:00 AM: Talk with Ana Cristina Gomez-Ugarte - Estimating bias in education-specific mortality and educational inequalities in mortality: A scenario-based study
the Auditorium - 057
Abstract
In many countries, educational inequalities in mortality can only be estimated from unlinked data sources – death certificates and censuses. Education misreporting in these sources is often common and it can generate biases in the mortality patterns and corresponding estimates of inequalities in mortality. Yet, the direction and magnitude of such biases are not known. The goal of this study is to provide a comprehensive evaluation of how education misreporting can bias education-specific estimates of mortality and education inequalities in mortality. Estimating these biases is practically impossible when the available data contains errors and no additional information is available. As such, we employ a scenario-based approach where, starting from a set of unbiased education-specific death counts and exposures, we progressively introduce increasing distortions in the reporting of these inputs. For each scenario, we derive the corresponding education-specific mortality rates and the degree of educational inequalities in mortality according to different commonly-used measures. Our results show that education overstatement in the death certificates downward biases educational inequalities in mortality, while education understatement upward biases such inequalities. Furthermore, we identified education overstatement as a possible cause of crossovers in education-specific mortality rates. This study provides the first rigorous assessment of how education misreporting can affect educational inequalities in mortality, providing critical insights to inform the development of methods to correct for such biases in the underlying data and therefore to generate a wider view on such inequalities on a global scale.
About
Ana Cristina Gomez-Ugarte is a PhD student at the Laboratory of Population Dynamics and Sustainable Wellbeing in the Department of Digital and Computational Demography. Her research focuses on socioeconomic inequalities in mortality, with a particular emphasis in LMICs.
Register to Take Part
You would like to attend the Online Seminar Talk? You are very welcome. Please register by writing an e-mail to office-zagheni@demogr.mpg.de.
Online Seminar Talk, July, 25th from 11:00 a.m. to 12 p.m. (Rostock time)