The Place of the Hypothetical cohort in Modern Demography

Speaker: Evgeny Andreev - PhD, Head of the International Laboratory for Population and Health 

Abstract: The  hypothetical cohort arose together with demography. It was this construct that John Graunt and the earliest demographers used in their calculations. Only in the nineteenth century did the concept acquire a clear definition: an imaginary cohort of individuals who are born and live their entire lives under the mortality conditions of the period under observation. Subsequently, the conditional (synthetic) cohort was extended to the study of other demographic processes and their combinations. Yet only in mortality analysis does the synthetic cohort remain the primary analytical tool. The vast majority of published life tables—and those stored in databases—are computed for synthetic cohorts.
Calculations for synthetic cohorts are used to assess how the risk of death varies with age, although it is evident that in prosperous countries, where each successive generation lives longer than the previous one, mortality in a synthetic cohort increases with age more rapidly than in real cohorts. Most mortality forecasts and assessments of the prospects for increases in human longevity are based on synthetic cohorts.
In analyses of cause-specific mortality, reliance on synthetic cohorts often becomes a source of error in identifying causal relationships. Unlike fertility or nuptiality, mortality in real cohorts can be examined only for very old cohorts—undoubtedly the chief reason for the popularity of synthetic cohorts in mortality research.
An alternative to the synthetic cohort also appeared in the nineteenth century. William Farr’s standard population allows researchers to avoid the pitfalls of the synthetic cohort, yet it remains surprisingly underused in demographic practice.

Working language: Russian
Time: October 2, at 14:00
Venue: online platform

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If you have any problems with registration, you can write to Vera Sokolova by email: vsokolova@hse.ru