A distributional approach to measuring lifespan stratification

Jiaxin Shi, José Manuel Aburto, Pekka Martikainen, Lasse Tarkiainen and Alyson van Raalte

Population Studies, 2023, vol. 77, issue 1, 15-33

Abstract: The study of the mortality differences between groups has traditionally focused on metrics that describe average levels of mortality, for example life expectancy and standardized mortality rates. Additional insights can be gained by using statistical distance metrics to examine differences in lifespan distributions between groups. Here, we use a distance metric, the non-overlap index, to capture the sociological concept of stratification, which emphasizes the emergence of unique, hierarchically layered social strata. We show an application using Finnish registration data that cover the entire population over the period from 1996 to 2017. The results indicate that lifespan stratification and life-expectancy differences between income groups both increased substantially from 1996 to 2008; subsequently, life-expectancy differences declined, whereas stratification stagnated for men and increased for women. We conclude that the non-overlap index uncovers a unique domain of inequalities in mortality and helps to capture important between-group differences that conventional approaches miss.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00324728.2022.2057576 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rpstxx:v:77:y:2023:i:1:p:15-33

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rpst20

DOI: 10.1080/00324728.2022.2057576

Access Statistics for this article

Population Studies is currently edited by John Simons, Francesco Billari, James J. Brown, John Cleland, Andrew Foster, John McDonald, Tom Moultrie, Mikko Myrsklä, Alice Reid, Wendy Sigle-Rushton, Ronald Skeldon and Frans Willekens

More articles in Population Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().