Longevity and Lifespan Variation by Educational Attainment in Spain: 1960–2015

Abstract

For a long time, studies of socioeconomic gradients in health have limited their attention to between-group comparisons. Yet, ignoring the differences that might exist within groups and focusing on group-specific life expectancy levels and trends alone, one might arrive at overly simplistic conclusions. Using data from the Spanish Encuesta Sociodemográfica and recently released mortality files by the Spanish Statistical Office (INE), this is the first study to simultaneously document (1) the gradient in life expectancy by educational attainment groups and (2) the inequality in ageat-death distributions within and across those groups for the period between 1960 and 2015 in Spain. Our findings suggest that life expectancy has been increasing for all education groups but particularly among the highly educated. We observe diverging trends in life expectancy, with the differences between the low-and highly educated becoming increasingly large, particularly among men. Concomitantly with increasing disparities across groups, length-oflife inequality has decreased for the population as a whole and for most education groups, and the contribution of the between-group component of inequality to overall inequality has been extremely small. Even if between-group inequality has increased over time, its contribution has been too small to have sizable effects on overall inequality. In addition, our results suggest that education expansion and declining within-group variability might have been the Post-print. Demography (First online 15 Oct. 2018) 2 main drivers of overall lifespan inequality reductions. Nevertheless, the diverging trends in longevity and lifespan inequality across education groups is an important phenomenon whose underlying causes and potential implications should be investigated in detail.

Changing contribution of area-level deprivation to total variance in age at death: a population-based decomposition analysis

“…The results of these additional analyses showed our estimates from the Carstairs Score for part-postcode sectors to be the most conservative. However, our estimates of life expectancy31 and estimates variation in age at death are comparable and within the range of values reported from other populations and based on other measures 2–5 45…”

“…Our study is the first to use an area-level measure of deprivation to demonstrate that those living in the most deprived areas can expect to live the shortest lives and experience the greatest variation in age at death. This finding is consistent with international evidence using income data for Denmark,2 occupational data for Finland3 and education data for the USA4 and Spain 5. If we consider steep socio-economic gradients in the uncertainty of longevity to be bad, then this consistent finding across contexts and across socio-economic measures represents a double burden of mortality inequality.…”

“…Similarly, when measuring occupation in Finland the upper non-manual class variation was below 9 years while the manual class experience above 11 years variation in 2010 3. Estimates for the USA and Spain using education to measure socio-economic inequality showed similar gaps in variation in age at death 4 5. Higher variation in age at death implies greater uncertainty, leading to the notion that the social patterning of these two distinct dimensions of mortality should be considered as a double burden of inequality.…”

Diversification in causes of death in low-mortality countries: emerging patterns and implications

“…6 However, evidence shows that lifespan variation sometimes increases with life expectancy. [8][9][10][11][12][13] In addition, trends in several countries indicate that continued improvements in longevity are not inevitable, with sustained stalls or even declines in life expectancy having occurred in some low mortality countries, such as the UK, Denmark and the USA. [14][15][16] In these cases, the adverse mortality trends were not experienced at all ages.…”

Income-related inequality in quality-adjusted life expectancy in Korea at the national and district levels

“…Socioeconomic inequalities in life expectancy (LE) have been well documented [1][2][3]. However, relatively few reports have investigated socioeconomic inequalities in health expectancy (HE).…”