Age-Linked Institutions and Age Reporting Among Older African Americans

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Penn collection
PARC Working Paper Series
Degree type
Discipline
Subject
African Americans
age reporting
Social Security Administration
death certificates
Demography, Population, and Ecology
Family, Life Course, and Society
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Sociology
Funder
Grant number
License
Copyright date
Distributor
Related resources
Author
Hill, Mark E.
Rosenwaike, Ira
Contributor
Abstract

With economic and technological development, numerical age became an important dimension of social differentiation in the United States. The vast majority of Americans now have the ability to report their own age and the ages of relatives with accuracy. Nevertheless, studies have found that age misreporting remains substantial for older African Americans. This paper describes levels of age misreporting and investigates the determinants of age reporting accuracy on the death certificates of a national sample of native-born African Americans aged 65+. Consistent with previous studies, levels of age misreporting are found to be high. When checked against childhood census records, only 53% of the death certificate ages are found to be correctly reported; slightly over 10% are misstated by five years or more. Multivariate results provide compelling evidence that the quality of age reporting critically depends on interaction with age-linked institutions.

Advisor
Date Range for Data Collection (Start Date)
Date Range for Data Collection (End Date)
Digital Object Identifier
Series name and number
Publication date
1995-09-01
Volume number
Issue number
Publisher
Publisher DOI
Journal Issue
Comments
Recommended Citation: Hill, Mark E., Samuel H. Preston, Irma T. Elo, and Ira Rosenwaike. 1995. "Age-Linked Institutions and Age Reporting Among Older African Americans." PARC Working Paper Series, WPS 95-05. This working paper was published in a journal: Hill, Mark E., Samuel H. Preston, Irma T. Elo, and Ira Rosenwaike. 1997. "Age-Linked Institutions and Age Reporting Among Older African Americans." Social Forces 75(3):1007-1030. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2580528.
Recommended citation
Collection