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Article: Rates: Age-Adjusted
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- Encyclopedia of Public Health
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CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 The Gale Group Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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RATES: AGE-ADJUSTED
Two common methods of age-adjustment or standardization are the direct and indirect methods. The direct method uses weighted averages (for instance, of age-specific rates) according to a predetermined formula based on the age distributions of the populations being compared. The rates actually observed in the populations are applied to an arbitrarily chosen "standard" population, for example, the population recorded at a census in Sweden in 1940, or a "theoretical" distribution constructed by imagining what the U.S. population might have been in 1960 if certain assumptions had been correct. If numbers in some age ...