Longevity in small areas and their socio-economic, demographic and environmental characteristics: a hierarchical Bayesian approach

Rosa Maria Lipsi, Università di Roma "La Sapienza"

Recently, Graziella Caselli e Rosa Maria Lipsi have identified isolated pockets of longevity areas in some Italian regions as Sardinia, Sicily and Campania. To investigate geographical longevity they reconstructed the standardized mortality ratio and for them, to overcome the high variability among municipalities of the same size they used a Kernel smoothing method. The maps obtained showed groups of municipalities that shared homogeneous mortality patterns. The first aim is to overlap the longevity areas obtained with the mentioned kernel smoothing method with those obtained by using hierarchical Bayesian spatial models, considering that, the last ones, as recently pointed out by many authors, make more consistent inference on the geographical variation of a phenomenon. The second aim is to apply the Bayesian approach to the spatial analysis of the socio-economic, demographic and environmental characteristics of the longevity areas in order to verify the hypothesis of the positive effect on longevity for Elderly living in small municipalities.