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Porträttfoto

Jonas Helgertz

Vice Dean Research, Associate Professor

Porträttfoto

A new strategy for linking U.S. historical censuses : A case study for the IPUMS multigenerational longitudinal panel

Author

  • Jonas Helgertz
  • Joseph Price
  • Jacob Wellington
  • Kelly J. Thompson
  • Steven Ruggles
  • Catherine A. Fitch

Summary, in English

This paper presents a probabilistic method of record linkage, developed using the U.S. full count censuses of 1900 and 1910 but applicable to many sources of digitized historical records. The method links records using a two-step approach, first establishing high confidence matches among men by exploiting a comprehensive set of individual and contextual characteristics. The method then proceeds to link both men and women by leveraging links between households established in the first step. While only the first stage links can be directly comparable to other popular methods in research on the U.S., our method yields both considerably higher linkage rates and greater accuracy while only performing negligibly worse than other algorithms in resembling the target population.

Department/s

  • Department of Economic History
  • Centre for Economic Demography

Publishing year

2022

Language

English

Pages

12-29

Publication/Series

Historical Methods

Volume

55

Issue

1

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Heldref Publications

Topic

  • History and Archaeology

Keywords

  • census data
  • machine learning
  • Record linkage
  • United States of America

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 0161-5440