Hybrid Format

Reassessing socioeconomic inequalities in mortality via distributional similarities

Ana Cristina Gomez Ugarte Valerio
Laboratory of Population Dynamics and Sustainable Wellbeing, October 08, 2023

Hybrid Seminar Talk, October 8, 2023 from 11am to 12pm (CEST)

Abstract

Commonly used measures of socioeconomic inequalities in mortality, such as the slope index and the relative index of inequality, are based on summary measures of the group-specific age-at-death distributions (e.g. standardized mortality rate or life expectancy). While this approach is informative, it ignores valuable information contained in the different distributions. We propose a mortality inequality measure that readily captures the distributional difference between two or more population's subgroups.

Leveraging a metric of statistical distance, our Population Total Variation (PTV) measure is sensitive not only  to changes in the means or variances, but also to broader mortality changes that affect  distributional shapes. We use observed mortality data by socioeconomic groups to asses mortality inequalities with both established measures and our proposed PTV. 

Our findings suggest that conventional summary-based measures can bias our understanding of socioeconomic inequalities in mortality. We present applications based on educational groups and groups defined by an area-level deprivation measure to exemplify how the PTV can be applied in different data availability contexts. We conclude that measuring distributional similarities in mortality enhances our understanding of between-group inequalities in mortality. 

About the speaker

Ana Cristina Gómez-Ugarte is a PhD student in the Department of Digital and Computational Demography in the Laboratory of Population Dynamics and Sustainable Wellbeing. She is interested in the measurement of socioeconomic inequalities in mortality, particularly in data scarce contexts.