Category: Demography

How has cardiovascular disease contributed to the rural–urban life expectancy gap?

Leah Abrams

In the United States, rural residents do not live as long as their urban counterparts. This disparity has been widening for decades. Around 1970, urban life expectancy was 70.9 years, compared with 70.5 in rural areas, but by 2005–2009, the difference was greater (78.8 versus 76.8 years). In our research recently published in the IJE, we found that the gap in life expectancy would be even wider today if declines in cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality had not dramatically slowed around 2010.

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Lexis Cubes 2 – Case-study: Log mortality for males in Finland, 1878 to 2012

Jon Minton16 - 138 Jon Minton

In my earlier blog post, I introduced the concept first of thinking about demographic data like spatial data, and like spatial data producing ‘maps’ of the data’s demographic topography; and secondly, of reifying and rendering these statistical surfaces as three dimensional objects, either using computer generated imagery or 3D printers. This blog post will describe just one of these surfaces, a ‘statistical sculpture’ showing how the logarithm of mortality risk has changed for males in Finland from 1878 to 2012. Continue reading “Lexis Cubes 2 – Case-study: Log mortality for males in Finland, 1878 to 2012” →

Lexis cubes 1: From maps of space to maps of time

Jon Minton16 - 138 Jon Minton

Introduction
A Lexis surface is a Cartesian mapping of three attributes to three dimensions:

  • year (or another measure of absolute time) to the x axis,
  • age (or another measure of relative time) to the y axis,
  • a third variable, which co-varies with year and age, to the z axis.

Put another way: a Lexis surface is a way of visualising temporal change as if it were spatial change, of thinking about time as if it were space: of absolute time as if it were latitude, relative time as if it were longitude, and a third variable as if it were a height above sea level. Continue reading “Lexis cubes 1: From maps of space to maps of time” →