Abstract
The comparative use of census data is a useful way to study social characteristics across national boundaries. However, truly comparative demographic history is not possible without fully integrating separate census data, uniting multiple data files with a common set of comparably coded variables. This paper describes the integration of the 1871 Canadian census public use sample with similar samples of the 1850 and 1880 American censuses to form the Integrated Canadian-American Public Use Microdata Series (ICAPUMS). These data sets lent themselves well to integration because of their strong similarities in sampling design, data collection and data organization. Consistency in the availability and treatment of variables also eased integration of the samples, although the harmonization of occupation variables presented significant challenges. The ICAPUMS features a general household relationship variable which allows us to examine household structure across the two countries and three years. The paper concludes by proposing some general principles of census data set integration. This integrated data set is now available to researchers on the website of the University of Minnesota Historical Census Projects (www.hist.umn.edu/~ipums).
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Abbreviations
- PUMS:
-
Public Use Microdata Sample
- ICAPUMS:
-
Integrated Canadian-American Public Use Microdata Series
- IPUMS:
-
Integrated Public Use Microdata Series
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Lisa Y Dillon is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Minnesota. Her dissertation, titled “Growing Old in North America: Living Arrangements of the Elderly in Canada, 1871, and the United States, 1850 and 1880” is based on a quantitative analysis of households and families in the ICAPUMS, as well as qualitative sources from the Ontario Provincial Archives and the Ohio State Archives. She first presented the results of her integration of the Canadian and American PUMS in Montreal at Visions of History: The Tenth Annual Meeting of the Association for History and Computing (August, 1995). In 1995, she published a co-authored article with Matthew Sobek, “Interpreting Work: Classifying Occupations in the Public Use Microdata Samples,” Historical Methods. She has taught Early American history at the University of Minnesota, and has worked as a research assistant for the Minnesota Historical Census Projects.
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Dillon, L.Y. Integrating nineteenth-century Canadian and American census data sets. Comput Hum 30, 381–392 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00054021
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00054021