Search

CNPq - Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico FAPEMIG - Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Minas Gerais CAPES - Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior One of the basic tasks in demography is to produce reliable estimates. To do that, demographers require high data quality or being able to detect and correct errors. Unfortunately, in most countries data are deficient and is it necessary to be critical about the reliability of the available information. Therefore, this dissertation deals with data quality issues that are related, directly or indirectly, with survival analysis. We divided this study into three articles. The first one focuses on cohort mortality analysis in the absence of complete cohort mortality data, using the Truncated Cross-sectional Average Length of Life (TCAL). The second study examines data quality issues among the oldest-old population, focusing on the estimation of centenarians. The third article evaluates education reporting among adults in order to offer evidences of education misstatement. All the articles provide alternative ways to minimize the lack of complete cohort mortality data or the existence of inaccurate data. Para os demógrafos, é de grande relevância a produção de estimativas confiáveis. No entanto, para alcançar tal objetivo, é necessário dispor de dados de boa qualidade ou detectar e corrigir erros nos dados. Infelizmente, na maioria dos países, os dados contêm erros, logo, é necessário ser crítico quanto à confiabilidade das informações disponíveis. Por isso, esta tese aborda problemas na qualidade dos dados que estão relacionados, direta ou indiretamente, à análise de sobrevivência. Nós dividimos este estudo em três artigos. O primeiro centra-se na análise da mortalidade por coorte, mesmo quando não se dispõe de informações completas de mortalidade por coorte utilizando The Truncated Cross-sectional Average Length of Life (TCAL). O segundo estudo examina questões relacionadas à qualidade de dados no segmento populacional mais envelhecido, estimando, de maneira indireta, a população centenária. O terceiro artigo avalia a qualidade da educação reportada nos censos, com o objetivo de identificar erros nesta informação. Todos os três artigos que compõem esta tese contribuem com a discussão sobre a qualidade dos dados, apontando alternativas para contornar essas limitações.

Testing theories about human senescence and longevity demands accurate information on older-adult mortality; this is rare in low- to middle-income countries where raw data may be distorted by defective completeness and systematic age misreporting. For this reason, such populations are frequently excluded from empirical tests of mortality and longevity theories, thus limiting their reach, as they reflect only a small and selected human mortality experience. In this paper we formulate an integrated method to compute estimates of older-adult mortality when vital registration and population counts are defective due to inaccurate coverage and/or systematic age misreporting. The procedure is validated with a simulation study that identifies a strategy to compute adjustments, which, under some assumptions, performs quite well. While the paper focuses on Latin American and Caribbean countries, the method is quite general and, with additional information and some model reformulation, could be applied to other populations with similar problems. Palloni’s research was supported by the National Institute on Aging via research project grants R01-AG016209, R03-AG015673, R01-AG018016, R37-AG025216, R01AG056608, and R01AG52030; by a Fogarty International Center award for Global Research Training in Population Health, D43-TW001586; by core grants to the Center for Demography and Ecology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, R24-HD047873 and to the Center for Demography of Health and Aging, University of Wisconsin-Madison, P30-AG017266 and by a European Research Council (ERC) grant under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 788582). The authors are grateful to Gilbert Brenes and Luis Rosero Bixby from the Central American Population Center at the University of Costa Rica for providing special tabulations. Beltrán-Sánchez’s research was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (P2C D041022) to the California Center for Population Research at UCLA