J Forensic Sci. 2024;00:1–10. | 1 wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jfo Received: 1 December 2023 | Revised: 29 January 2024 | Accepted: 4 March 2024 DOI: 10.1111/1556-4029.15505 ORIGINAL PAPER Anthropology Considerations for age estimation accuracy: Method-derived outcomes and practitioner interpretations Cris Hughes PhD 1 | An-Di Yim PhD 2 | Chelsey Juarez PhD 3 This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. © 2024 The Authors. Journal of Forensic Sciences published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Academy of Forensic Sciences. Presented at the 76th Annual Scientific Conference of the American Academy of Forensic sciences, February 19-24, 2024, in Denver, CO. 1 Department of Anthropology and Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA 2 Forensic Science Program, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, USA 3 Department of Anthropology, California State University Fresno, Fresno, California, USA Correspondence Cris Hughes, Department of Anthropology and Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois Urbana- Champaign, 607 S. Matthews Avenue, 109 Davenport Hall, Urbana, IL 61801, USA. Email: hughesc@illinois.edu Abstract Recent research observed 92% accuracy for age-at-death estimations by U.S. forensic anthropologists. The present study compares this case report level accuracy to method level accuracy for the most commonly used methods in U.S. casework, drawing from the Forensic Anthropology Database for Assessing Methods Accuracy (FADAMA). Method application rate (i.e., how often a method is used in casework) was analyzed for n = 641 cases and identified 15 methods with an application rate >45 cases, and the present study focused further analyses on these 15 methods. Of the 15, only four yielded accuracies greater than or equal to the 92% documented for case-report level accuracy. The other 11 methods produced accuracy rates ranging from 54% to 91%, with six of these below 70% This disconnect between highly accurate age es- timations at the case report level compared to the poor performance at method level suggests that practitioner interpretation and synthesis of the methods' outcomes is a critical step for increasing the accuracy rates of the age estimations as reported on the final case report. This inference was further supported by the study's results which indicated that practitioner interpretations of frequently used method combinations improve accuracy and age range width of age estimation. The study also performed a Fisher's Exact test to assess whether case report-level accuracy differed with the number of aging methods used in a case, and found no significant differences. KEYWORDS accuracy, age estimation, casework, forensic anthropology, interpretations, methods Highlights • The accuracy of the 15 most commonly applied age estimation methods ranges from 54% to 100% • The median number of methods applied for age estimation to a given case is 3.5. • There are no significant differences in accuracy when using one to five methods for age estimation. • Interpretations of combining method outcomes improve both accuracy and age range width. • Accuracy in real-world casework is greater than those published in method validation studies.