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Black-White Differences in Mortality Compression and Deceleration and the Mortality Crossover Reconsidered

Department of Sociology and Office of Population Research, Princeton University, slynch{at}princeton.edu

J. Scott Brown

Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Katherine G. Harmsen

Department of Sociology and Center for Demographic Studies, Duke University

Most studies investigating Black-White differences in mortality patterns have focused exclusively on the well-known crossover but have ignored other aspects of the mortality curves, such as deceleration and compression. Yet compression and deceleration are also important features of mortality curves that may vary by race. In this research, the authors developed models for data from 1972 to 1990 and estimated them using naive and more stringent assumptions about Black data quality. They found that mortality deceleration begins at older ages for Blacks than for Whites but that the ages of deceleration onset are converging. The authors also found that mortality compression is occurring for Blacks but not for Whites and that compression is more apparent for Blacks when data quality is considered. Finally, the authors found that a crossover exists, that the age at crossover is increasing across time, and that the age at crossover is later in adjusted data than in unadjusted data.

Key Words: mortality crossover • mortality demography • population heterogeneity • race differences

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