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On Feeney's method for correcting age distributions for heaping on multiples of five.


 Age distributions obtained from censuses and surveys in most developing countries exhibit heaping on ages that are multiples of 5. Feeney's method, which involves an iterative procedure, is somewhat complicated. The paper investigates the possibility that a simpler procedure for smoothing or adjusting age distributions may yield equally effective results. Feeney's method and 2 alternative approaches are applied to age data for India, Indonesia, and Tanganyika and the results compared. Feeney's method was applied to the recorded census age distributions of India for 1971 and Tanganyika for 1967; these age returns and those of Indonesia for 1971 were graduated by a simple 9-point moving average and by applying a 9-point moving average twice. The recorded and graduated age distributions obtained from the 3 methods are given. Aside from a few tail frequencies, the adjusted age distributions yielded by the simple 9-point moving average applied once and twice show close agreement with that produced by Feeney's procedure. The graduation technics recommended by Gould and Malaker, as well as Methods A and B in this paper, do not specify a rationale and are more mechancial, and it is especially unsatisfactory at the 0-4 and open-ended age groups, resulting in reported numbers that are much too low at ages 0-4 and much too high at ages 85 and older. A moving average procedure is not always suitable for smoothing or adjusting age data, but it does produce much the same result as Feeney's more elaborate procedure.
