Updating the Proposal for Assessing the Quality of Census Count of Centenaries

The main goal of this study was to review and updating the proposal for assessing the quality of the census data counting of centenaries elderly people (RELAP—Revista Latinoamericana de Población Vol. 16: e202207). For the construction of the proposal, data were originally collected from individuals aged 100 years or older of the population census of 193 countries belonging to the United Nations, based on the last censuses of each country (mostly carried out in 2010 and 2011). It is thus justified the need to review the parameters used for the construction of this proposal, as well as update it with more recent census data. Following the original proposal, this study was based on a group of indicators for regional population groups in the world. Three demographic indicators were constructed: Centenarians’ Sex Ratio; for male and female, the ratio of population aged 100 years and over to the population aged 85 years or over was calculated. These indicators were calculated for the 85 countries selected among the initial 193, which were related to the Human Development Index and life expectancy at birth applying linear regression. Once a high relationship was proven, the multivariate classification technique cluster analysis was applied to select groups of countries with similar characteristics and formulate ranges of values for each indicator. Three clusters were identified assigning respective weights. The latter were reclassified into five categories with weights ranging from high to low quality data count of centenarians. The revised and updated proposal showed good internal consistency, with results consistent with the reality of the countries studied, satisfactory levels of application, scalability and reproducibility for different locations. Furthermore, the proposed classification is easy to understand and simple, and uses few indicators. Therefore, the use of the revised proposal may favor the understanding of the true panorama in the distribution of longlived elderly of the world.