Reply to Trends in Education-Specific Life Expectancy, Data Quality, and Shifting Education Distributions: A Note on Recent Research
Year: 2017
Type: letter
Abstract: Replication studies are commendable: no single study should be taken at face value.Nevertheless, replications should be approached with an equal amount of healthy skepticism.I turned to the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) first when writing the original paper (Sasson 2016a) and found it too limited for studying trends in life expectancy and higher-order life table functions by education-particularly for U.S. minority groups.Unfortunately, the NHIS suffers from two notable sources of error that seem to outweigh the benefits of more accurate education reporting: (1) systematic error, in that its population is significantly healthier than the U.S. population, irrespective of education; and (2) random error, whereby considerable sampling variability prohibits any meaningful inference about trends in lifespan variation.Based on new results presented in this reply, I maintain that the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS), in spite of its known limitations, remains the single most comprehensive data source for studying trends in lifespan variation by education.As for trends in life expectancy by education for non-Hispanic whites, I contend that the findings reported in Sasson (2016a) are in fact in line with previous studies based on NHIS data (e.g., Montez et al. 2011;Montez and Zajacova 2013), showing rising mortality among low-educated white American women but only minor changes among low-educated white men from 1990 to 2010.The discrepancies Hendi reported largely stem from ignoring sampling variability, owing to small sample sizes and changes too small in magnitude to detect.Furthermore, one cannot reject the findings I presented (Sasson 2016a) while accepting those of Case and Deaton (2015)-as Hendi suggested, with both studies relying on NVSS data-because our findings are one and the same.As I have shown elsewhere (Sasson 2016b), the rise in midlife mortality, coupled with continued declines in old-age mortality, is precisely the reason for the increase in
Source: Demography
Author: Isaac Sasson
Institution: Tel Aviv University
Language: English
Subfield: Demography
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2609752367