Abstract
The basic life table and its extensions have been at the heart of mathematical demography since the first life tables were introduced some 300 years ago. To appreciate the scope and power of life table models, consider a group of newborns. They constitute a cohort, a closed group that shares some initial condition, in this case time of birth. If you were to follow that cohort from birth until the last member died, you could compile a detailed picture of the cohort’s life experience. By recording ages, you would know how many survived to attain each birthday, the probability of surviving from one age to another, the person-years lived at every age (i.e., the number of years lived multiplied by the number of persons living them), the mortality rates, and the expectation of life. You could keep more detailed records, noting the sex, marital status, place of residence, and other characteristics of each member of the cohort. Such information would enable you to examine the nature of their lives with regard to a considerable number of variables, and while the records might become large and the calculations complex, the concept underlying them—fidelity to the actual experience of a real group of people—would remain clear and concrete.
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© 1988 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Schoen, R. (1988). The Basic Life Table. In: Modeling Multigroup Populations. The Springer Series on Demographic Methods and Population Analysis. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2055-3_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2055-3_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
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