AGE-LINKED INSTITUTIONS AND AGE REPORTING AMONG OLDER AFRICAN-AMERICANS

With economic and technological development, numerical age became an i mportant dimension of social differentiation in the U.S. The Past majo rity of Americans now have the ability to report their own age and the ages of relatives with accuracy. Nevertheless, studies have found tha t age misreporting remains substantial for older African Americans. Th is article describes levels of age misreporting and investigates the d eterminants of age reporting accuracy on the death certificates of a n ational sample of native-born African Americans aged 65 and older. Con sistent with previous studies, levels of age misreporting are found to be high. When checked against childhood census records, only 53% of t he death certificate ages are correctly reported; move than 10% are mi sstated by five years or more. Multivariate results provide compelling evidence that the quality of age reporting critically depends on inte raction with age-linked institutions.