Bereavement Expectancies: Introduction to a New Population Health Metric

Ashton Verdery (Penn State University) will present “Bereavement Expectancies: Introduction to a New Population Health Metric” as part of the CPR Seminar Series. This event is co-sponsored by the Sociology Department. 

Abstract: Recent years have seen substantial attention to changes in population health metrics that track mortality sources, trends, and disparities. Although existing metrics offer important population-level insights, they focus on aggregating individualized experiences of death rather than considering its social ramifications, such as how death affects surviving family members.

A growing body of scholarship on bereavement—the experience of losing close contacts—offers new considerations for what population health metrics might measure. Experiencing bereavement, especially of family members, is strongly associated with detrimental outcomes, including poor mental health, diminished physical health, and elevated mortality risks. However, no formalized population health metrics currently capture bereavement sources, trends, and disparities. We introduce the concept of bereavement expectancy, a new population health metric similar to life expectancy that summarizes the population-level probability of losing different types of relatives to different causes of death across demographic groups.

Drawing on recently developed methods, bereavement expectancies provide point-in-time estimates of the bereavement landscape implied by a given demographic regime. To illustrate their utility, we calculate bereavement expectancies for 113 causes of death in the United States, with a particular focus on racial disparities in exposure to familial death from different causes. By linking classic measures of mortality to familial bereavement, bereavement expectancies offer new insights into the lived experience of health disparities and their potential for intergenerational impacts