Racial Disparities in the Life Lived without Parents: A Multistate Life Table Based on Survey Estimates and Matrix Projections

Michael Jongho Moon, University of Toronto
Benjamin-Samuel Schlüter, University of Toronto
Monica Alexander, University of Toronto

In the United States, vulnerable racial and ethnic groups, in particular non-Hispanic black people, have long experienced disparities in mortality risk and life expectancy. The historically continuing disparities suggest that their children are likely to face a parental loss at an earlier age, which may lead to life-long implications including physical and psychological risks from the traumatic experience. These disadvantages would exacerbate the existing disparities. We estimate the life years lived without parents by racial and ethnic groups with demographic and statistical models. Our approach combines multiple sources of public data including population life tables, matrix projections based on historical population fertility and mortality rates, and age-specific parent mortality status proportions and rates from survey data in a Bayesian framework. We applied the framework to different racial and ethnic groups in the United States. The result revealed that non-Hispanic black children are at disadvantage from the very ages with notably shorter expected years to live with both parents. The non-Hispanic black children instead expect to live with only their mother for longer from their births.

Keywords: Bayesian methods , Population projections, forecasts, and estimations, Mortality and Longevity, Inequality, Disadvantage and Discrimination

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