Living Longer and Healthier? An Advancement of Methodology and Understanding on Health Expectancy
Life expectancy has been increasing in many countries in the past decades. Health expectancy, as a helpful indicator to gauge the well-being of older adults and the sustainability of the future economy and public welfare policies, however, does not always show the same increase. These diverging patterns might result in greater numbers of elderly requiring healthcare and living in compromised quality of life. Multistate life table models are widely used to compute health expectancy from the survey, but they require strict and simple assumptions, which could produce results deviating from the actual dynamics of health over the life course.
As many developed and developing societies are transitioning or soon to be transitioning to aging societies, it is imperative to produce more realistic health expectancies accounting for life-course dynamics. The primary objective of this dissertation is to improve the multistate life table model and to better understand and estimate the healthy life expectancy. Simultaneously, substantive findings may emerge by applying improved methods across populations or subpopulations.
Tianyu Shen is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Demography at the ANU. His Ph.D. project centres on the analysis of social inequalities in health in the Asia Pacific region and the development of multistate models to capture population dynamics. He completed the Master of Social Research in 2020 at the ANU and has since been a research assistance in the School of Demography. He was involved in “State Population Projections Model for the Centre for Population”, “ACT Treasury population projections”, “Overcoming the problems of inconsistent migration data in the Asia Pacific” and "ACT School enrollment projection".
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