A Bayesian Analysis of the Spatial Concentration of Individual Wealth in the US North During the Nineteenth Century

Background: Kin effects can be difficult to distinguish from those of spatial proximity, since kin tend to live close to each other. Thus, past research showing correlations between the wealth of relatives may be showing the effects of proximity and shared locations, not the effects of kin. Objective: What are the effects of kin and of spatial proximity upon wealth? This is studied both for fathers and sons and for brothers. Methods: Data comes from a genealogical sample that has been linked to the US census of 1860. The genealogies allow us to identify fathers, sons, and brothers, information that is not available from the census itself. A Bayesian hierarchical approach can model family and spatial effects at the same time, thereby distinguishing them from each other. Results: Data on fathers and sons is difficult to interpret from a single time. Many of the fathers in the census had died, so the sample size was small. A man\u27s wealth was positively associated with his brothers\u27 average wealth, even after their father had died. Therefore, there was evidence for lasting family effects; however, proximity to the other brothers was not related to an individual\u27s wealth. Conclusions: The family effects were stronger than the spatial effects at this time, even though this sample was highly mobile. Thus, there was evidence for family effects apart from spatial effects. Comments: This study shows how Bayesian spatial analysis can be used to disentangle the effects of family from the effects of spatial location. The method was capable of distinguishing spatial from family effects

La migration des fils et des filles au départ du foyer dans le nord de la Suède et le nord des États-Unis en 1850

Au fil du temps, les parentèles se dispersent et les liens familiaux changent. Cette étude des différences entre les sexes au point de vue de la migration et de la dispersion géographique des enfants à partir de la maison paternelle repose sur deux populations essentiellement rurales du milieu du 19e siècle. Les analyses ont d’abord porté sur la population de la région côtière de Skellefteå, dans le nord de la Suède, pour laquelle des données sur chaque sexe étaient disponibles. Les résultats obtenus ont servi à l’estimation des différences selon le sexe au sein de populations natives du nord des États-Unis, pour lesquelles l’information sur le sexe féminin était limitée. La plupart des enfants adultes des deux groupes s’étaient établis à proximité de l’endroit où vivait leur père, et la proportion de fils sédentaires était la même dans les deux populations. Plus de filles que de fils s’étaient établies ailleurs dans la région de Skellefteå, et la situation était probablement similaire aux États-Unis. Toutefois, les distances entre membres de la même famille étaient plus grandes aux États-Unis. Les hommes étaient regroupés en communautés patrilinéaires plus souvent que les femmes, en raison notamment de la transmission de la terre aux fils et de la prédominance du mariage virilocal. Ces résultats sont mis en rapport avec les pratiques migratoires et matrimoniales, l’aménagement de l’espace et les réalités économiques propres à chacune des deux régions étudiées.In the course of time, families disperse and kin relationships change. The differences between the genders in migration and the resulting differences in spatial dispersion of the children from their fathers were analyzed in two largely rural populations in the mid-19th century. The analyses were performed mainly on the Swedish population in the northern coastal Skellefteå region, where data on both genders was available. The results were used to estimate gender differences among a native-born population in the northern U.S., where information about women was limited. Most adult children resided in the same places as their fathers, and the proportion of co-resident sons was the same in both populations. However, more daughters than sons were located elsewhere in Skellefteå and probably also in the U.S. The distances separating relatives were, however, greater in the U.S. Men lived in patrilineal clusters to a greater extent than did women due, in part, to patrilineal inheritance and virilocal marriages. The results were discussed with reference to migration and marriage patterns, spatial organization and economic differences

Understanding U.S. regional linguistic variation with Twitter data analysis

We analyze a Big Data set of geo-tagged tweets for a year (Oct. 2013–Oct. 2014) to understand the regional linguistic variation in the U.S. Prior work on regional linguistic variations usually took a long time to collect data and focused on either rural or urban areas. Geo-tagged Twitter data offers an unprecedented database with rich linguistic representation of fine spatiotemporal resolution and continuity. From the one-year Twitter corpus, we extract lexical characteristics for twitter users by summarizing the frequencies of a set of lexical alternations that each user has used. We spatially aggregate and smooth each lexical characteristic to derive county-based linguistic variables, from which orthogonal dimensions are extracted using the principal component analysis (PCA). Finally a regionalization method is used to discover hierarchical dialect regions using the PCA components. The regionalization results reveal interesting linguistic regional variations in the U.S. The discovered regions not only confirm past research findings in the literature but also provide new insights and a more detailed understanding of very recent linguistic patterns in the U.S