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Measuring Uncertainty in Population Data Generated by the Cohort-Component Method: A Report on Research in Progress

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Book cover Applied Demography in the 21st Century

Building on work by Kintner and Swanson (1990, 1993a, 1993b), and Swanson et al. (1993), Swanson et al. (1994) describe a procedure for generating a formal measure of uncertainty (in the form of confidence intervals) for short-term population projections made using the cohort-component method. Swanson et al. (1994) also provide an empirical example of this procedure by showing a set of age-sex projections for a small area (Nye County, Nevada) to 2000 using a 1990 launch date. However, Swanson et al. (1994) give no assessment against a census benchmark because the 2000 census results were not available when the initial work was done and other limitations precluded doing projections from earlier launch dates that could be assessed against 1990 and other existing census results. In this paper, I provide such an assessment by doing an ex post facto comparison of the confidence intervals generated for age-sex projections of this small-area population against actual 2000 census counts.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of California, Riverside, CA, USA

    David A. Swanson

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  1. David A. Swanson
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Rice University, Houston, TX, USA

    Steve H. Murdock

  2. University of California, Riverside, CA, USA

    David A. Swanson

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Swanson, D.A. (2008). Measuring Uncertainty in Population Data Generated by the Cohort-Component Method: A Report on Research in Progress. In: Murdock, S.H., Swanson, D.A. (eds) Applied Demography in the 21st Century. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8329-7_10

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