An approach to the analysis of mortality data gathered in long-term follow-up studies is described. The methodology is appropriate for situations in which it is of interest to contrast a study sample to a larger reference population. The main advantage of the approach is the ability to handle the age heterogeneity of the study group. Two variations of the general method are developed: the unconditional and conditional methods. The conditional approach is illustrated by application to data which arose in a study in psychiatric epidemiology.
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Woolson et al. (1978) studied this question.