Reliability of Age Reporting Among the Chinese Oldest-Old in the CLHLS Datasets

Abstract

This chapter evaluates age reporting among the oldest-old, especially centenarians, in the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey (CLHLS) based on comparisons of various indices of elderly age reporting and age distributions of centenarians in Sweden, Japan, England and Wales, Australia, Canada, China, the USA, and Chile. The analyses demonstrate that age reporting among the oldest-old interviewees (Han and six minority groups combined) in the 22 provinces in China where the CLHLS has been conducted is not as good as that in Sweden, Japan, and England and Wales, but is relatively close to that in Australia, more or less the same as that in Canada, better than that in the USA (all race groups combined), and much better than that in Chile. As indicated by the higher density of centenarians, age exaggeration exists in the six ethnic minority groups in the 22 Han-dominated provinces, although we cannot rule out and quantify the potential impacts of past mortality selection and better natural environmental conditions among these minority groups. We find that the age exaggeration of minorities in the CLHLS may not cause substantial biases in demographic and statistical analyses using the CLHLS data, since minorities consist of a rather small portion of the sample (6.8 percent at baseline and 5.5 percent in the grand total sample of the 1998, 2000, and 2002 waves).