Demography Essay, Research Paper

Brent Surace

Human Demography & Life Lab

A list of data collected from the headstones of men and women who have passed away at the Buies Creek cemetery both before and after the year 1930. Studies and comparisons were done to examine the similarities and differences between males and females and the years of their individual deaths.

The age of the deceased and their personal year of death were gathered from various headstones in an area of the cemetery. The number of deaths after 1930 was found to be much higher than of before 1930. This could be possibly attributed to WWII or any other number of alternate reasons; also women were found to survive the men most often in the datum collected. Advances in modern medicine and the improvement of the quality of nourishment are both shown in the higher survivorship of those living after 1930. The answers for why these numbers reflect what they do may not always be determined down to a single, exact theory; making conclusions sometimes hard for a straight 100% correct answer. A certain amount of human error in the collecting of the data is also usually accepted, but must be considered when drawing conclusions from experiments, for this reason the answers must be drawn with such things in mind. In dealing with life-tables many variables come into play that are sometimes processed with the rest of the data and sometimes overlooked, making results contradict or vary when compared to another experiment on the same subject.

Uncontroversial facts that can be gathered from this lab is that women can and have shown to possess the ability to outlive the men born around the same time. The fact that persons born toward the end of this century have been shown to exhibit surviving skills that are higher than that of those born prior to the year 1930.