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Title: The linkage of micro census data to vital records: New perspectives for longitudinal studies

Citation Type: Conference Paper

Publication Year: 2014

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Abstract: Some years ago, we initiated the development of a linkage program relying on systematic and automated tools and procedures to match microdata from the Canadian censuses to those from Quebec civil records. The development of this program is at the heart of the construction of the Integrated Infrastructure of the Quebec Population Historical Microdata (IQPM) which will integrate all available historical microdata on the Quebec population dating back to the beginning of European settlement, into a set of relational databases. In this paper, we will describe the development and implementation of the linkage program which contains three modules: one for linking census data to BALSAC families; one for linking BALSAC families to census data; and one for linking sets of data from distinct censuses. We will illustrate how it works by providing examples of linkage results and estimates of success rates from datasets on the city of Trois-Rivières and on the Saguenay region for seven modern nominal censuses (1852 to 1911). We will also emphasize how the linkage of census and vital data can make a major contribution to the construction of census-based longitudinal datasets. When completed, the IQPM will comprise data from these seven censuses on close to a million individuals belonging to 161,000 distinct households from two urban settings and three regions mixing rural and urban environments. All these data will have been linked to corresponding vital event records from the BALSAC database. To conclude, we will give an overview of the research opportunities that will emerge from the matching of the two types of data both for the social and the biological sciences as this vast array of biographical information will permit studies based on individual trajectories situated within families, households and communities and examined from a multigenerational perspective.

Url: https://balsac.ca/documents/linkage-vezinaetal.pdf

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Authors: Vézina, Hélène; St-Hilaire, Marc; Bellavance, Claude

Conference Name: First Conference of the European Society of Historical Demography

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Data Collections: IPUMS NHGIS

Topics: Other, Population Data Science

Countries: United States