Age reporting among white Americans aged 85+: Results of a record linkage study

This study investigates age reporting on the death certificates of older wh ite Americans. We link a sample of death certificates for native-born white s aged 85+ in 1985 to Social Security Administration records and to records of the U.S. censuses of 1900, 1910, and 1920. When ages in these sources a re compared, inconsistencies are found to be minimal, even beyond age 95. R esults show little distortion and no systematic biases in the reported age distribution of deaths. To explore the effect of age misreporting on old-ag e mortality, we estimate "corrected" age-specific death rates by the extinc t-generation method for the U.S. white cohort born in 1885. With few except ions, corrected and uncorrected rates in single years differ by less than 3 % and are not systematically biased. When we compare corrected rates with t hose for the same birth cohort in France, Japan, and Sweden, we find that w hite American mortality at older ages is exceptionally low.