The unrealized potential: cohort effects and age-period-cohort analysis

This study aims to provide a systematical introduction of age-period-cohort (APC) analysis to South Korean readers who are unfamiliar with this method (we provide an extended version of this study in Korean). As health data in South Korea has substantially accumulated, population-level studies that explore long-term trends of health status and health inequalities and identify macrosocial determinants of the trends are needed. Analyzing long-term trends requires to discern independent effects of age, period, and cohort using APC analysis. Most existing health and aging literature have used cross-sectional or short-term available panel data to identify age or period effects ignoring cohort effects. This under-use of APC analysis may be attributed to the identification (ID) problem caused by the perfect linear dependency across age, period, and cohort. This study explores recently developed three APC models to address the ID problem and adequately estimate the effects of A-P-C: intrinsic estimator-APC models for tabular age by period data; hierarchical cross-classified random effects models for repeated cross-sectional data; and hierarchical APC-growth curve models for accelerated longitudinal panel data. An analytic exemplar for each model was provided. APC analysis may contribute to identifying biological, historical, and socioeconomic determinants in long-term trends of health status and health inequalities as well as examining Korean’s aging trajectories and temporal trends of period and cohort effects. For designing effective health policies that improve Korean population’s health and reduce health inequalities, it is essential to understand independent effects of the three temporal factors by using the innovative APC models.