Cohen J E
Am Stat. 1986 Feb;40(1):32-9.
"The purpose of this article is to show that if many characteristics affect the mortality of individuals, there are intrinsic limits to the ability of demographers to answer two elementary questions:" whether the force of mortality in the last year was more or less severe in one country relative to that in a second, and whether an individual's chance of survival would have been greater in one or the other of the two countries. The author notes that the conclusions are applicable to all demographic crude rates. "The possibility of encountering Simpson's paradox suggests that since sex is only one of many possible stratifying variables that appear to affect mortality, the use of mortality tables distinguished by sex and by no other variables is, in the absence of information about the importance of other variables, demographically arbitrary."
本文的目的是表明，如果许多特征影响个体的死亡率，那么人口统计学家在回答两个基本问题时的能力存在内在限制：“相对于另一个国家，一个国家去年的死亡力是更强还是更弱”，以及“在这两个国家中的一个或另一个国家，个体的生存机会是否会更大”。作者指出，这些结论适用于所有人口统计学粗率。“遇到辛普森悖论的可能性表明，由于性别只是众多似乎影响死亡率的可能分层变量之一，在缺乏关于其他变量重要性信息的情况下，使用按性别而非其他变量区分的死亡率表在人口统计学上是任意的。”
