ETHNIC TRENDS IN SURVIVAL CURVES AND MORTALITY

The nature of secular trends in survival curves has been widely debate d. Fries (1984) has argued for increasing rectangularization, while My ers and Manton (1984a; 1984b) have observed increases in mean age at d eath with little or no change in standard deviation arguing against re ctangularization. We hypothesize that ethnic differences in mortality trends may shed light on this argument. Using California population da ta for 1970, 1980, and 1990, we examined ethnic differences in rectang ularization using both visual and means and standard deviations analys es. The resulting patterns varied by ethnicity, gender, and type of an alyses. Nearly all female groups demonstrated modest rectangularizatio n, regardless of mean age of death, while most of the male groups did not.