Death Heaping in Vital Statistics

Abstract

Several authors have maintained that there tends to be a practice in statistical record keeping for an individual's age to be rounded off to the nearest digit ending in zero or five. This practice has been termed “age heaping.” This is a well established tendency in census data. The present study attempts to expand the aforementioned premise of age heaping to the study of death or mortality records. Since it has been established that age heaping occurs, one might speculate that a similar occurrence may be present in mortality data. This study presents statistical data that support the idea of “death heaping” in state vital statistics. Specifically, the authors attempt to show the possibility for the death date to be assigned as the birth date when there may be no adequate record of the date of birth for an individual who dies.