The Future of Historical Family Demography
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SO38CH18-Ruggles ARI 20 April 2012 15:7 V I E E W R S I E N C N A D V A The Future of Historical Family Demography Steven Ruggles Minnesota Population Center and Department of History, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455; email: [email protected] Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2012. 38:18.1–18.19 Keywords The Annual Review of Sociology is online at family transition, family composition, historical sociology, patriarchal soc.annualreviews.org family This article’s doi: 10.1146/annurev-soc-071811-145533 Abstract Copyright c 2012 by Annual Reviews. An explosion of new data sources describing historical family compo- All rights reserved sition is opening unprecedented opportunities for discovery and anal- 0360-0572/12/0811-0001$20.00 ysis. The new data will allow comparative multilevel analysis of spatial patterns and will support studies of the transformation of living arrange- ments over the past 200 years. Using measurement methods that assess family choices at the individual level and analytic strategies that assess variations across space and time, we can dissect the decline of patriar- chal family forms in the developed world and place Northwest Europe and North America in global comparative context. 18.1 SO38CH18-Ruggles ARI 20 April 2012 15:7 INTRODUCTION moment or a brief period between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries. This is an extraordinary moment for historical This chronological focus misses the main family demography. We are in the midst of an action. The transformative changes in the explosion of new data resources that are open- family—such as the decline of intergen- ing unprecedented opportunities for discovery erational coresidence, the rise of marital and analysis. This review explores the impli- instability, and the increase of single- cations of the new data sources for the study parent families—occurred after the of the composition of households, families, and mid-nineteenth century. kin groups.1 I have three main arguments: We should use demographically ap- I begin by describing the new data resources propriate measures. To make big that have recently been released or will soon comparisons and analyze household become available. I then provide an overview of and family composition across time and the origins of historical family demography and space, we must use the best available describe the ways that the new data can allow us methods and be sensitive to the effects of to break free from limiting debates and methods variation in both population composition of the past. Finally, I comment on some of the and the availability of kin. This means broad theoretical issues facing the field. that we should avoid common measures currently in widespread use. We should study spatial variation in fam- NEW DATA ilies and households. Historical research For the past half-century, the great bulk of on the demography of households and historical studies of families and households re- families has focused on analysis of small lied on small data sets laboriously gathered by communities. One of the rationales for individual scholars to describe particular com- the community approach has been that munities in the eighteenth or nineteenth cen- local conditions have a powerful influence tury. The data sets were usually proprietary and on residence decisions. In fact, I argue, were rarely made public. the only way we can evaluate the impact Recent large-scale international collabora- of local conditions on household and tions have provided scholars with access to hun- family structure is to conduct multilevel dreds of millions of records from dozens of data analyses that assess the characteristics of sets, and new projects now under way are poised many communities simultaneously. to disseminate an avalanche of new historical We should study long-run historical data in the coming years. These initiatives are change. Most historical studies of liv- designed to maximize comparability across time ing arrangements focus on a single and space, and they are conceived as shared re- sources for the research community. The new initiatives are listed in Table 1. 1In accordance with United Nations (2001) definitions, I use the term household to mean a person or group of people who live together and make common provision for food or other Integrated Public Use essentials for living, and family to mean a group of people residing in the same household who recognize a kin rela- Microdata Series tionship, ordinarily through descent, marriage, or adoption. The Integrated Public Use Microdata Series I use the term kin group to refer to the broader group of persons recognized as kin, regardless of living arrangements. (IPUMS) was conceived in 1991 as a method Following Cherlin (2003), I define family demography as the for making heterogeneous US Census data study of (a) the configuration of families, households, and kin sets for the period since 1850 easily interop- groups, and (b) transitions that affect those configurations. Such transitions include departure from a parental home, erable, thereby simplifying analysis of histori- marriage, marital dissolution, and cohabitation. cal change. In 1999, IPUMS began to expand 18.2 Ruggles SO38CH18-Ruggles ARI 20 April 2012 15:7 Table 1 Major new historical data infrastructure projects International IPUMS Integrated Public Use Microdata Series http://www.ipums.org NAPP North Atlantic Population Project http://www.nappdata.org IDS/EHPS-Net European Historical Population Samples http://www.iisg.nl/hsn/news/ehps-net.php Network Mosaic Recovering Historical Census Records http://www.censusmosaic.org National CMGPD China Multi-Generational Panel Dataset http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/CMGPD/ HPR Norwegian Historical Population Registers http://www.rhd.uit.no/nhdc/hpr.html POPLINK Swedish Historical Population Registers http://www.ddb.umu.se/databaser/poplink/ CCRI Canadian Century Research Infrastucture http://www.canada.uottawa.ca/ccri/CCRI/index.htm I-CeM Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM) http://www.essex.ac.uk/history/research/ICeM/default.aspx Project beyond US borders, and today the project part- Egypt, Ireland, and Mexico. All 12 partners ners with the national statistical agencies of will contribute new data sets, so by 2016 the over 100 countries to disseminate census and project will include 64 censuses taken between survey microdata for the period since 1960. 1787 and 1930 describing the living arrange- IPUMS is the world’s largest demographic mi- ments of approximately 365 million persons crodata collection; it is currently disseminating (Ruggles et al. 2011). For 90% of these cases, over 800 million cases of integrated microdata the IPUMS project will provide comparable drawn from more than 750 censuses and surveys data pertaining to the period since 1960. To (IPUMS 2011). Over the next five years, the make long-run comparisons easy—and to help database is scheduled to double in size (Sobek ensure the long-run sustainability—the NAPP et al. 2011). database is being incorporated into the IPUMS infrastructure. The North Atlantic Population Project The North Atlantic Population Project Intermediate Data Structure (NAPP) is a collaboration of researchers in Historical demographers have created a Britain, Canada, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, variety of large-scale longitudinal databases and the United States to make a harmonized constructed by linking information from database of nineteenth-century census enu- population registers, genealogies, or church merations (NAPP 2011). Most of the NAPP records to provide continuous information data sets are not samples, but rather include on historical life courses. Among the most entire national populations. In addition to prominent are the Demographic Data Base disseminating cross-sectional microdata, the (Umea˚ University), the Scanian Demographic partnership is exploiting data-mining technol- Database (Lund University), the Balzac Popu- ogy to develop representative linked samples lation Register (Quebec), the Utah Population with multiple observations in individuals, Database, the Enqueteˆ TRA (France), and the families, and households (Goeken et al. 2011). Historical Sample of the Netherlands. Many A new phase of the NAPP project is now being of these databases provide direct measures of launched, with an expansive interpretation household composition, and they all include of the term “North Atlantic”: New NAPP information of crucial importance for historical partners include Albania, Denmark, Germany, family demography. The creators of these data www.annualreviews.org • The Future of Historical Family Demography 18.3 SO38CH18-Ruggles ARI 20 April 2012 15:7 collections have sometimes tried to share them release in August 2011 provided 10 data sets with outside researchers, but owing to the from 7 countries with 315,000 observations, complexity of the data, access is cumbersome and collaborators have already pledged to con- and usage of each database is concentrated tribute dozens of additional files. Over the next among its producers. decade, Mosaic organizers hope to expand the The Intermediate Data Structure (IDS) is collection to cover 40 countries with millions an ambitious collaboration among the world’s of observations spanning five centuries. major producers of longitudinal historical databases. The goal is to open access to the collections and to make them interoperable. National Projects The project involves converting about 15 lon- The explosion of new data is not limited to gitudinal databases into a common structure these