Creating a nationally representative individual and household sample for Great Britain, 1851 to 1901: the Victorian Panel Study (VPS)

'This publication is a direct result of an earlier scoping study undertaken for the ESRC's Research Resources Board which investigated the potential for creating a new longitudinal database of individuals and households for the period 1851 to 1901 - the Victorian Panel Study (VPS). The basic concept of the VPS is to create a unique longitudinal database of individuals and households for Great Britain spanning the period 1851-1901. The proposed VPS project raises a number of methodological and logistical challenges, and it is these which are the focus of this publication. The basic idea of the VPS is simple in concept. It would take as its base the individuals and households recorded in the existing ESRC-funded computerised national two per cent sample of the 1851 British census, created by Professor Michael Anderson, and trace these through subsequent registration and census information for the fifty-year period to 1901. The result would be a linked database with each census year between 1851 and 1901 in essence acting as a surrogate 'wave', associated with information from registration events that occurred between census years. Although the idea of a VPS can be expressed in this short and simple fashion, designing and planning it, together with identifying and justifying the resources necessary to create it, is a complex set of tasks, and it is these which this publication seeks to address. The primary aims and objectives of the project described in this publication were essentially as follows: to estimate the potential user demand for a VPS and examine the uses to which it may be put; to test the suitability of the existing 1851 census sample as an appropriate starting point for a VPS; to test differing sampling and methodological issues; to investigate record-linkage strategies; to investigate the relationship between the VPS and other longitudinal data projects (both contemporary and historical); and to recommend a framework and strategy for creating a full VPS. The structure and contents of this publication follow this basic project plan.' (author's abstract

Chapter Twelve Revealing the Hidden Affliction

By the turn of the twentieth century the British nation’s declining birthrate was increasingly the subject of anxious public and scientific debate, as the Registrar General’s annual reports continued to confirm a downward national trend, which had in fact commenced from the late 1870s

Missing in the Census 1851-1911: The ‘lost’, ‘missing’, and ‘gaps’ in I-CeM and BBCE, with weights to adjust RSD populations

WP 23 first outlines the various gaps in e-census records from BBCE and I-CeM and how they have arisen. It assesses sources for identifying archivally lost records and compares these with the BBCE and I-CeM databases at the level of RSDs for census years 1851-6, and 1881-1911. The paper develops weights to compensate for the identified gaps and provides downloads of weights to be used with I-CeM and/or BBCE

Adapting the Own Children Method to allow comparison of fertility between populations with different marriage regimes.

The Own Children Method (OCM) is an indirect procedure for deriving age-specific fertility rates and total fertility from children living with their mothers at a census or survey. The method was designed primarily for the calculation of overall fertility, although there are variants that allow the calculation of marital fertility. In this paper we argue that the standard variants for calculating marital fertility can produce misleading results and require strong assumptions, particularly when applied to social or spatial subgroups. We present two new variants of the method for calculating marital fertility: the first of these allows for the presence of non-marital fertility and the second also permits the more robust calculation of rates for social subgroups of the population. We illustrate and test these using full-count census data for England and Wales in 1911

Revealing the Hidden Affliction: How Much Infertility Was Due to Venereal Disease in England and Wales on the Eve of the Great War?

By the turn of the twentieth century the British nation’s declining birthrate was increasingly the subject of anxious public and scientific debate, as the Registrar General’s annual reports continued to confirm a downward national trend, which had in fact commenced from the late 1870s. The secularist Malthusian League had positively promoted birth control, and now economists and eugenicists, feminists and Fabians, as well as leading figures in the church and in the medical profession, all agreed that this was a momentous matter. Previously, human fecundity—the capacity to conceive and reproduce—had not been considered a significant social variable. While the fertility of individuals or couples might be subject to some variation, with the odd exception populations and nations had dependably high fertility. Since Malthus—and even more so since Darwin’s generalization of Malthus’s proposition to all species—it was an accepted fact that nature was fecund to a fault. Fertility was too robust, not too frail. Consequently, one of the eternal human predicaments, both for the individual and for government, was how to rein in this exuberant fertility. So the dawning perception of the nation’s flagging and apparently fragile vitality—and indeed that of several other urbanizing nations, too—was a serious shock, expressed not just in politics but also science and literature

Revisiting the Fertility Transition in England and Wales: The Role of Social Class and Migration

Funder: University of CambridgeAbstract: We use individual-level census data for England and Wales for the period 1851–1911 to investigate the interplay between social class and geographical context determining patterns of childbearing during the fertility transition. We also consider the effect of spatial mobility or lifetime migration on individual fertility behavior in the early phases of demographic modernization. Prior research on the fertility transition in England and Wales has demonstrated substantial variation in fertility levels and declines by different social groups; however, these findings were generally reported at a broad geographical level, disguising local variation and complicated by residential segregation along social class and occupational lines. Our findings confirm a clear pattern of widening social class differences in recent net fertility, providing strong support for the argument that belonging to a certain social group was an important determinant of early adoption of new reproductive behavior in marriage in England and Wales. However, a relatively constant effect of lower net fertility among long-distance migrants both before the transition and in the early phases of declining fertility indicates that life course migration patterns were most likely factor in explaining the differences in fertility operating through postponement of marriage and childbearing

Identification of the remains of King Richard III

In 2012, a skeleton was excavated at the presumed site of the Grey Friars friary in Leicester, the last-known resting place of King Richard III. Archaeological, osteological and radiocarbon dating data were consistent with th

Chapter Twelve Revealing the Hidden Affliction

By the turn of the twentieth century the British nation’s declining birthrate was increasingly the subject of anxious public and scientific debate, as the Registrar General’s annual reports continued to confirm a downward national trend, which had in fact commenced from the late 1870s

Research data Weights supporting "Missing in the Census 1851-1911: The ‘lost’, ‘missing’, and ‘gaps’ in I-CeM and BBCE, with weights to adjust RSD populations"

Gives the weights to compensate for the identified gaps for missing and lost data in the censuses 1851-1911 England and Wales for use with I-CeM and/or BBCE. Data gaps as defined in WP 2