THE EFFECT OF ALTERNATIVE AGE ADJUSTMENT PROCEDURES ON THE ANALYSIS I OF URBAN MORTALITY PATTERNS.

The article discusses the effect of alternative age adjustment procedures on the analysis of urban mortality patterns. Analyses of mortality differences among populations need a single index of the overall mortality experience of each population. The conclusions one draws about the nature of mortality's correlates are a function of the type age adjustment used. In this paper housing was more important than income in explaining variations in the crude death rate and the indirect standardized rate. However, income was more important than housing in explaining variations in the direct standardized rate. Indirect standardization in itself is not necessarily enough to eliminate the compositional effect of age. Attention must be given to the extent to which there is a correspondence between the standard population's age-specific rates and those for the population studied. Census tracts, since their populations are comparatively small, are quite subject to great fluctuations in the number of deaths per year in the different age categories.