Consistency of age reporting on death certificates and social security records among elderly African Americans

This paper investigates the quality of age data among African Americans in two sets of government documents extensively used to study health and mortality among the elderly in the United States, namely vital statistics and Medicare/Social Security data. The analyses reveal significant inconsistencies in age reporting in the two sources. A linkage of records to a third data source, the U.S. Censuses of 1900, 1910, and 1920, reveals that Social Security data provide a superior source of age information among elderly African Americans, although the quality of data at the highest ages in this source is also suspect. Analyses of factors associated with consistency of age reporting in the two sources identify birth record availability and literacy to be key influences. The authors conclude that studies involving elderly African Americans should institute independent age verification procedures at the baseline interview in order to draw accurate conclusions about age-related processes among this population subgroup. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.