The Gerontologist, Vol 35, Issue 3 318-326, Copyright © 1995 by The Gerontological Society of America

ARTICLES

Ethnic trends in survival curves and mortality

CG Go, JE Brustrom, MF Lynch and CM Aldwin
Department of Applied Behavioral Sciences, University of California, Davis 95616, USA.

The nature of secular trends in survival curves has been widely debated. Fries (1984) has argued for increasing rectangularization, while Myers and Manton (1984a; 1984b) have observed increases in mean age at death with little or no change in standard deviation--arguing against rectangularization. We hypothesize that ethnic differences in mortality trends may shed light on this argument. Using California population data for 1970, 1980, and 1990, we examined ethnic differences in rectangularization using both visual and means and standard deviations analyses. The resulting patterns varied by ethnicity, gender, and type of analyses. Nearly all female groups demonstrated modest rectangularization, regardless of mean age of death, while most of the male groups did not.

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