Selected demographic methods of mortality analysis : Approaches focused on adults and the oldest age-groups using primarily cross-sectional data
Abstrakt
Questions about human life span, longevity and mortality in general are natural to almost everyone. This work deals with one central question – whether some limit of human life span or of its improvements exists.
It is rather a methodological work, therefore its aim is to introduce not only relevant theories but above all the methods usable in the mortality analysis focused on adults or the oldest-old. At the beginning, the most important theories and opinions of scientist dealing with mortality are introduced.
The theme of life tables is opened by an analysis of its construction in the Czech Republic, together with its possible modifications. As a result the independent macro code for the SAS software was prepared (available online).
This macro enables to calculate the unknown parameters of selected mortality functions by the method of weighted non-linear least squares and to produce smoothed and extrapolated values of mortality rates. In the second half of the work, there are several more sophisticated methods introduced.
The first of them is analysis of the rectangularization process which is closely related to the life tables. The process is studied through several defined indicators.
Based on the results, the terms “derectangularization” and “shifting” were distinguished clearly. The process of mortality shifting was analyzed more in depth.
Existence of this process is also the most important assumption in the analysis of tempo effects. In this work the situation when this assumption does not hold was also solved.
Finally, the last methodological chapter was devoted to the frailty models, a concept related more to cohort data. All the presented methods were applied also to real data.
Where possible, data from Eastern as well as Western or Northern European countries were used.