The sick and the well: adult health in Britain during the health transition

Using adult life-long histories of health experience among a group of men and women born in Britain between 1725 and 1874, this paper examines individual health during the mortality decline. The risk of initiating a new sickness declined sharply between the cohorts born in the eighteenth century and those born during 1825-74, but the average duration of each episode increased. As successive cohorts added to their life expectancy, survival time rose more sharply than did well time. Continuity rather than change is apparent in another aspect of their health experience, the capacity of prior health to predict future sickness and wellness. Among the men and the women and in the eighteenth-century cohorts as well as the cohorts of 1825-74, the degree of wellness or sickness evident early in adult life strongly predicted future sick time for 15 to 20 years, and strongly predicted future sickness events for a longer period still. Moreover, women surpassed men in their propensity to hold on to the health status exhibited in early adulthood

When protoindustry collapsed fertility and the demographic regime in rural Eastern Belgium during the industrial revolution

'Die Geschichte der demographischen Transition wird oft als ein Gegensatz zwischen einem dynamischen städtisch-industriellen Sektor und einem statischen und Traditionen verhafteten Land dargestellt. Ländliche Gebiete werden als Bastionen der Stabilität gesehen, welche den transformierenden ökonomischen und kulturellen Kräften widerstanden, die von den städtischen Zentren ausgingen. Dieser Stereotyp ignoriert den Wandel, der innerhalb des ländlichen Bereichs sowohl in seiner Beziehung zur städtisch-industriellen Welt als auch in seiner eigenen internen Ökonomie erfolgte. Wenn wir ihr generatives Verhalten betrachten, sehen wir, dass die Bewohner des ostbelgischen Landes in einem großen Umfang in der Lage waren, mit ländlicher Desindustrialisierung, Bevölkerungsdruck und urbaner industrieller Entwicklung fertig zu werden. Es ist nicht angebracht, den späten Übergang zu niedriger ehelicher Fruchtbarkeit als ein Mangel an Anpassungsfähigkeit zu sehen, denn das Jahrhundert hindurch wurde genau das Gegenteil unter Beweis gestellt.' (Autorenreferat)'The story of the demographic transition is often told as a contrast between a dynamic urban-industrial sector and a static and traditional countryside. Rural areas are viewed as bastions of stability that resisted the transformative economic and cultural forces emanating from urban centers. This stereotype ignores the transformation occurring within the rural sector, in both its relationships with the urban-industrial world and its own internal economy. Looking at their demographic regime, especially the fertility pattern, we see that to a large extent, inhabitants of East Belgian countryside were able to cope with rural deindustrialization, population pressure and urban industrial development. It is not reasonable to see their late transition to low marital fertility as a lack of adaptive capacities, when they showed exactly the contrary throughout the century.' (author's abstract

Defining and distributing longitudinal historical data in a general way through an intermediate structure

'Der Beitrag diskutiert am Beispiel von demographischen Mikrodaten methodologische Probleme von Längsschnittdaten. Die Herausforderungen bestehen darin, 1. Lebensverläufe in kartesische Datenformate zu transformieren, die mit den Erfordernissen gängiger statistischer Analysesysteme kompatibel sind, und 2. Datensätze für interlokale und interkulturelle Studien vergleichbar zu machen. Um dieses Ziel zu erreichen wird eine intermediäre Datenstruktur (IDS) vorgeschlagen, die auf alle Datenbanken übertragen kann. Die Autoren erläutern den Vorteil des IDS-Ansatzes und die Maßnahmen, die zur Umsetzung des Konzeptes führen werden.' (Autorenreferat)'In recent years, studies of historical populations have shifted from tracing large-scale processes to analyzing longitudinal micro data in the form of 'life histories'. This approach expands the scope of social history by integrating data on a range of life course events. The complexity of life-course analysis, however, has limited most researchers to working with one specific database. The authors discuss methodological problems raised by longitudinal historical data and the challenge of converting life histories into rectangular datasets compatible with statistical analysis systems. The logical next step is comparing life courses across local and national databases, and they propose a strategy for sharing historical longitudinal data based on an intermediate data structure (IDS) that can be adopted by all databases. They describe the benefits of the IDS approach and activities that will advance the goals of simplifying and promoting research with longitudinal historical data.' (author's abstract

Height, Wealth, and Longevity in 19th century East Belgium

peer reviewedEpidemiologists and demographers have long suspected that childhood experiences affect mortality at later ages, but it has been very difficult to separate the persistent effects of early life conditions from other determinants of health. Individuals raised in poor families are more likely to be economically deprived in adulthood, and poor health can cause lower socio-economic achievement. We use life histories from a 19th century community to identify the long-term effects of deprivation in childhood. Heights derived from military conscription examinations provide a summary measure of childhood experiences of nutrition and disease. We find a complex pattern of relationships between wealth, height, marriage, and mortality across the life course. Parental wealth was related to height, which in turn affected the likelihood that a man would marry. Height and wealth in adulthood were strongly related to survival in old age in earlier cohorts, but this relationship weakened after 1850.Les épidémiologistes et les démographes ont pendant longtemps suspecté les conditions de vie et de maladie au cours de l'enfance d'influencer la mortalité ultérieure, mais il a été difficile de faire la part entre les effets de ces conditions et les autres facteurs s'exerçant sur la santé. Les enfants élevés dans les familles pauvres connaissent plus fréquemment que les autres une situation économique très difficile au cours de leur âge adulte mais une mauvaise santé peut conduire à des difficultés socio-économiques. Un suivi longitudinal des membres d'une communauté du xixe siècle permet ici d'identifier les effets de long terme des privations au cours des premières années de vie. La taille, appréciée lors du conseil de révision, fournit un indice des conditions de nutrition et de morbidité de l'enfance. Il ressort de l'analyse des relations complexes entre la richesse, la taille, le mariage et la mortalité tout au long de la vie. L'aisance des parents est corrélée avec la taille des enfants qui affecte à son tour la probabilité qu'un homme se marie. La taille et l'aisance au cours de l'âge adulte sont fortement corrélées à la survie dans la vieillesse en particulier pour les premières générations du siècle, la relation s'affaiblit pour celles nées après 1850

Re-introducing the Cambridge Group Family Reconstitutions

English Population History from Family Reconstitution 1580–1837 was important both for its scope and its methodology. The volume was based on data from family reconstitutions of 26 parishes carefully selected to represent 250 years of English demographic history. These data remain relevant for new research questions, such as studying the intergenerational inheritance of fertility and mortality. To expand their availability the family reconstitutions have been translated into new formats: a relational database, the Intermediate Data Structure (IDS) and an episode file for fertility analysis. This paper describes that process and examines the impact of methodological decisions on analysis of the data. Wrigley, Davies, Oeppen, and Schofield were sensitive to changes in the quality of the parish registers and cautiously applied the principles of family reconstitution developed by Louis Henry. We examine how these choices affect the measurement of fertility and biases that are introduced when important principles are ignored

The Savings of Ordinary Americans: The Philidelphia Saving Fund Society in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

We explore the savings behavior and saving rates of ordinary Americans through their accounts at the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society. the oldest mutual savings bank in the United States founded in 1816 to encourage thrift among the working poor. Our sample contains the 2.374 accounts opened in 1850. of which one-quarter were linked to the 1850 census manuscripts. Savings accounts were generally brief affairs; only 30 percent lasted more than 5 years. But median balances mounted to about three-quarters of annual income in about three to four years. Deposits and withdrawals were infrequent. but substantial. The median deposit was about 1 to 2 months of gross income whereas the median withdrawal represented about 2 to 3 months but occurred far less often. Account holders. then. did not generally use their accounts for the short-run fluctuations in income we suspect they experienced. Only female servants. as a group. used their accounts for life-cycle savings eventually amassing large nest eggs through steady but slow accumulation. Men often used their accounts to hold funds on route to acquiring physical property. Estimated saving rates range from a low of 12 percent to a more sensible one of 21 percent among only active accounts.

Computing Statistics from Private Data

In several domains, privacy presents a significant obstacle to scientific and analytic research, and limits the economic, social, health and scholastic benefits that could be derived from such research. These concerns stem from the need for privacy about personally identifiable information (PII), commercial intellectual property, and other types of information. For example, businesses, researchers, and policymakers may benefit by analyzing aggregate information about markets, but individual companies may not be willing to reveal information about risks, strategies, and weaknesses that could be exploited by competitors. Extracting valuable utility from the new “big data” economy demands new privacy technologies to overcome barriers that impede sensitive data from being aggregated and analyzed. Secure multiparty computation (MPC) is a collection of cryptographic technologies that can be used to effectively cope with some of these obstacles, and provide a new means of allowing researchers to coordinate and analyze sensitive data collections, obviating the need for data-owners to share the underlying data sets with other researchers or with each other. This paper outlines the findings that were made during interdisciplinary workshops that examined potential applications of MPC to data in the social and health sciences. The primary goals of this work are to describe the computational needs of these disciplines and to develop a specific roadmap for selecting efficient algorithms and protocols that can be used as a starting point for interdisciplinary projects between cryptographers and data scientists

The Enduring Value of Social Science Research: The Use and Reuse of Primary Research Data

This paper was presented at “The Organisation, Economics and Policy of Scientific Research” workshop, Torino, Italy, in April, 2010. See: http://www.carloalberto.org/files/brick_dime_strike_workshopagenda_april2010.pdf.The public-use data analyzed in this paper: Pienta, Amy M., and Jared Lyle. Data Sharing in the Social Sciences, 2009 [United States] Public Use Data. ICPSR29941-v1. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2016-12-15. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR29941.v1The goal of this paper is to examine the extent to which social science research data are shared and assess whether data sharing affects research productivity tied to the research data themselves. We construct a database from administrative records containing information about thousands of social science studies that have been conducted over the last 40 years. Included in the database are descriptions of social science data collections funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. A survey of the principal investigators of a subset of these social science awards was also conducted. We report that very few social science data collections are preserved and disseminated by an archive or institutional repository. Informal sharing of data in the social sciences is much more common. The main analysis examines publication metrics that can be tied to the research data collected with NSF and NIH funding – total publications, primary publications (including PI), and secondary publications (non-research team). Multivariate models of count of publications suggest that data sharing, especially sharing data through an archive, leads to many more times the publications than not sharing data. This finding is robust even when the models are adjusted for PI characteristics, grant award features, and institutional characteristics.National Library of Medicine (R01 LM009765). The creation of the LEADS database was also supported by the following research projects at ICPSR: P01 HD045753, U24 HD048404, and P30 AG004590.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78307/1/pienta_alter_lyle_100331.pdf-