FEMALE HEALTH EXPERIENCE OVER THE ADULT LIFE COURSE

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This project will explore female-male differences in health experience over the adult life course in ways designed to show how sickness experience earlier in adult life influences later health and the timing of death. Specific hypotheses about how earlier sickness adds increments toward a higher susceptibility to sickness or death will be explored within two theoretical models, heterogeneous frailty and insult accumulation. According to the first, individuals differ chiefly according to characteristics present at birth; according to the latter they differ chiefly as the result of such acquired characteristics as the lasting effects of sicknesses experienced earlier. This project will also produce baseline estimates for female sickness incidence and sickness time for an earlier period than any now available. Research will investigate health experience at the individual level among the members of three insurance funds in nineteenth-century Britain who were under continuous observation. Life table techniques and event history analysis will be employed to extract estimates of life expectancy, health life expectancy, and the rates and form of any insult accumulation that can be observed. One of the three insurance funds included only female members, and female-male differences in health experience provide a key means for assessing and interpreting results.