Abstract
Life expectancy is a widely used summary measure of the health of a population. Its calculation is based on the combination of separate mortality rates for different age groups of a population, within the same time period. The Standard (or direct) method for calculating life expectancy requires information on both the number of deaths for each age group and the population of that age group. When either of these two data sets is incomplete, alternative (indirect) methods have been proposed. The indirect methods generally require population data sets for the beginning and end of a period (first and second populations) as well as deaths data sets for the same period. Various adjustments are applied to the population and deaths data sets to derive a life table, from which life expectancy can be obtained.
| Original language | English |
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| Place of Publication | Darwin |
| Commissioning body | National Advisory Group on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Information and Data |
| Number of pages | 63 |
| Publication status | Published - 2008 |